In 2005 Michelle Green spent six months working with a humanitarian aid agency in Darfur, where millions of lives have been ruined since civil war erupted in 2003. To judge by this collection of 15 linked stories, the experience had a profound and lasting effect on her. The stories are jigsaw pieces that together form a picture of the complex network of actors in the Darfur tragedy: politicians, militiamen, rebels, aid workers, civilians. With her muscular, informative prose, Green creates interesting, believable characters whose pasts prey on them, who may even have come to the war zone to escape some specific misery, only to find that it has implacably followed them there. The stories help us understand Darfur, but they also help us grasp that, in fact, it can’t be fully understood. It is hellish, not rational, not logical. As the delicate links between the pieces are revealed, there is a sense that if they had come together into a novel some of the endings might have felt less abrupt. But the stories are serious, thought-provoking, memorable.
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