Warchild: A Boy Soldier's Story by Emmanuel Jal, with Megan Lloyd Davies

When the SPLA was split by Riek Machar in 1991, Jal followed Machar, a fellow Nuer tribesman, and defected. The move involved a march across savannah and swamp, which makes the Bravo Two Zero SAS team's escape from Iraq look like a wander around Hampton Court.

Having fought a three-day battle (and hacked two wounded soldiers from northern Sudan to death) the young Jal and his friend Lam, who was old at 15, sneaked away. Four hundred miles later, Jal arrived at the new rebel base. A toe had rotted off and he'd lost half his body weight. Lam starved to death because he refused to eat wild animals or plants out of cultural pride. Jal, meanwhile, had been moments from eating his dead friend. Dozens of others died, or killed themselves, along the way. One of Sudan's "lost boys", Jal believed in himself and somehow clung to life when it would have been a blessing to embrace death. He charmed and chatted up guerrilla officers and aid workers, and began his ultimate but troubled salvation when he met Emma McCune, the legendary former British aid worker who married Machar.

Taken to Nairobi and cared for by McCune (until she died in a car accident), he struggled to adjust to the boredom of peace: you can take the child out of the war — but can you take the war out of the child? He would sneak out of her Nairobi home to crawl around in the undergrowth, reliving battles and honing his infantry skills. He missed the front line and the reassuring rhythms of combat when "... my AK47 pulled me closer to the battle. I danced to its beat, rocking and moving".

The "music" of war is a leitmotif throughout Warchild. And it is through music of a different kind, rap, that Jal has come to find peace and some redemption, as an international hip-hop performer. This is a moving addition to a growing number of child-soldier confessions and novels from Africa. Warchild also reveals in quiet little dissonant chords one of the nasty secrets of foreign aid.

Sudan's rebels relied heavily on stealing aid from fellow refugees in camps that were funded and fed by Western aid agencies and the United Nations. Without the food they stole and sold for weapons, the rebels might have sued for peace sooner.

And fewer boys would have been lost..

Synopsis by Foyles.co.uk

Emmanuel Jal was only seven years old when he was taken from his family home to become a child soldier with the rebel army in Sudan's bloody civil war for nearly five years. Beaten, starved and brutalised Emmanuel was put into battle in Ethiopia and southern Sudan carrying an AK-47 talller than himself. He attempted to leave the SPLA but was hunted down and thrown into a desert prison. He finally escaped and is now an internationally-acclaimed rap artist spreading messages of peace and reconciliation with his unique style of gospel rap.