Dave Eggers · 2006 · survival

Dave Eggers's 2006 novelized autobiography of Valentino Achak Deng. When militias burn his village of Marial Bai in southern Sudan, seven-year-old Valentino joins the thousands of 'Lost Boys' walking a thousand miles east to a refugee camp in Ethiopia, then south to Kakuma in Kenya after they are driven out - and finally, after years in the camps, to a hard new life in Atlanta.

1. 1
   Marial Bai

   Valentino's village in southern Sudan, burned by government-backed militia when he is a boy, scattering the children who flee east on foot without knowing if their families survive.

2. 2
   Pinyudo

   The refugee camp across the border in Ethiopia, reached after a deadly walk across desert and the crossing of the Gilo River, where thousands of the Lost Boys gather in hunger.

3. 3
   Kakuma

   The vast camp in northwestern Kenya where Valentino is driven when war forces the boys out of Ethiopia, and where he spends years of his youth waiting for a way out.

4. 4
   Atlanta

   Resettled to the United States in his early twenties, Valentino finds an America both bountiful and treacherous - robbed in his own apartment, telling his life story to hold on to it.