Desert’s End is based on the vicious mass abductions of young girls by Boko Haram, the Lord’s Resistance Army, and other thugs passing themselves off as True Believers. Reading about them, I kept wanting to give these children the means to defend themselves, and I decided that if I couldn’t do that in the real world I could at least do it in fiction. The central figures of Desert’s End repeatedly defy oppression, in the process managing to create a vital new community not just for themselves, but for other abused girls.
The brilliant Korobanti and her resourceful friend Suntu craft escape after escape in an odyssey that carries them through landmarks of human cruelty: first Camp Cobra, the capsule Dixie plantation where their companion slaves are worked and raped to death by men who don’t consider them human; then the desert garrison of Eden, an internment camp where they are as free as Japanese-Americans were in their World War II camps; and finally the crammed and dangerous enclave Smoke City, where despite local bigotry and foreign bombardment they not only thrive but create an Underground Railroad to save other girls from the suffering they once suffered.
Every week brings new reports that reinforce the topicality of this story, a topicality that is unfortunately not likely to wane. But if my project began in outrage, it was built by respect for characters who seemed to take on their own life the moment I invented them. I felt more like a chronicler than a creator, and I found hope in these stalwart young girls. Desert’s End is a novel of brutal realism, but it is also a novel of transcendence.