A dozen years after Charles Taylor's seizure of power in Liberia showed would-be dictators the efficacy of drugged-up eight-year-olds with Kalashnikovs, America has finally awoken to the realities of the two-decade-long civil wars in West Africa — a part of the world whose history, both distant and recent, is more closely linked with our own than we might like to think. The story has no doubt gone down more smoothly with a mocha latte and beats by Kanye West.

In Allah Is Not Obliged, ten-year-old Birahima's journey into the horrors of war after his mother's death is meant to prove a titular mantra: "Allah is not obliged to be fair about all the things he does here on earth." Accompanied by a local grigriman — a shaman — named Yacouba, the narrator leaves his village in Côte d'Ivoire in 1993 to find his faraway aunt, only to be captured and conscripted into Taylor's National Patriotic Front after crossing the border into Liberia.

Birahima is thrilled by life as a child soldier, initially, and he views killing as a small price to pay for a roof over his head, plenty to eat, and all the hash he can smoke. So when his commander is killed, Birahima merely switches to the side he'd been previously fighting against. Eventually, hearing that his aunt has moved there, Birahima winds up in Sierra Leone in the mid-1990s. The country is the very lowest circle of hell on earth, a place where he's considered lucky because he's an orphan: his comrades' initiations required that they kill one parent while the other watched.

As a sort of mercenary Candide, our hero is fictional, but the Ivoirean Kourouma, who died in 2003, uses Birahima as a guide through conflicts whose antagonists are very real. In that sense, the book's as good an introduction to the plight of West African child soldiers as any. But it endures as fiction, principally: a quest story as timeless and archetypal as its narrative voice is raw, ribald, profane, and unprecedented.

-Chris Parris-Lamb