Oprah Winfrey has announced her latest book club pick–and it’s a PBC selection, too: Say You’re One of Them, a collection of five short stories by Uwem Akpan. Though this is Oprah’s 63rd pick, it’s the first time she’s gone with a book of short stories, a shift she explained thusly: “This is a first for me because each one of these five stories really just left me gasping. Just an incredible book.”

The book was published last year to wide acclaim and hailed as a beautifully written work by a writer of great narrative skill and deep compassion — but it’s not what you’d call easy reading: Each of the five stories in is told from the perspective of an African child, and the narratives unflinchingly explore poverty, violence, and other forms of hardship.

The stories take the reader inside Nigeria, Benin, and Ethiopia, revealing in beautiful prose the barely imaginable hardships for children immersed in war-torn and impoverished Africa, where Christians clash with Muslims, parents succumb to AIDS, and good fortune is in very short supply.

Here’s what some critics had to say about Say You’re One of Them:

“A startling debut collection . . . Akpan is not striving for surreal effects. He is summoning miseries that are real. . . . He fuses a knowledge of African poverty and strife with a conspicuously literary approach to storytelling filtering tales of horror through the wide eyes of the young.” —New York Times

“These stories are complex, full of respect for the characters facing depravity, free of sensationalizing or glib judgments. They are dispatches from a journey, Akpan makes clear, which has only begun. It is to their credit that grim as they are—you cannot but hope these tales have a sequel.” —Cleveland Plain-Dealer

“Awe is the only appropriate response to Uwem Akpan’s stunning debut, Say You’re One of Them, a collection of five stories so ravishing and sad that I regret ever wasting superlatives on fiction that was merely very good.” —Entertainment Weekly

“Searing . . . In the end, the most enduring image of these disturbing, beautiful and hopeful stories is that of slipping away. Children disappear into the anonymous blur of the big city or into the darkness of the all-encompassing bush. One can only hope that they survive to live another day and tell another tale.” —San Francisco Chronicle

“It is not merely the subject that makes Akpan’s . . . writing so astonishing, translucent, and horrifying all at once; it is his talent with metaphor and imagery, his immersion into character and place. . . . Uwem Akpan has given these children their voices, and for the compassion and art in his stories I am grateful and changed.” —Susan Straight, Washington Post Book World

“All the promise and heartbreak of Africa today are brilliantly illuminated in this debut collection.” —Seattle Post-Intelligencer

Learn more about Say You’re One of Them and buy it for $1 when you join Progressive Book Club. (Click here.)