An acclaimed collection of short fiction, "a tour de force that takes readers into the lives glimpsed in passing on the evening news," writes the Associated Press.

One of the most celebrated debuts to arrive on the literary scene in years, Jesuit priest Uwem Akpan's startlingly real and devastatingly compassionate stories are being hailed as masterful and electrifying, as they humanize the perils of poverty and violence in Africa so indelibly that they enlarge what we know of the world.

The eight-year-old narrator of "An Ex-mas Feast" needs only enough money to buy books and pay fees in order to attend school. Even when his twelve-year-old sister becomes a prostitute to raise these meager funds, his dream can't be granted. Food comes first. His family lives in a street shanty in Nairobi, Kenya, but their way of both loving and taking advantage of each other strikes a universal chord.

Taking us far beyond what we thought we knew about the tribal conflict in Rwanda, “My Parents’ Bedroom” is told by a young girl, who, with her little brother, witnesses the worst possible scenario between parents asked to do the previously unimaginable in order to protect their children. “My Parents’ Bedroom” and “An Ex-mas Feast” first appeared in the New Yorker to much excitement and praise.

Say You’re One of Them also takes the reader inside Nigeria, Benin, and Ethiopia, revealing in beautiful prose the harsh consequences for children immersed in war-torn and impoverished Africa. Christians clash with Muslims, parents succumb to AIDS, and monstrous events ensue—all seen here through the wide-eyed gaze of the children caught in the middle.

Akpan's voice is a literary miracle, rendering lives of almost unimaginable deprivation and terror into stories that are ultimately luminous and transcendent. 

Praise for 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. A."
                                                           —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