Ishmael Beah & Dinaw Mengestu

Ishmael Beah’s 2007 memoir of life as a child soldier in Sierra Leone, A Long Way Gone, is a perennial New York Times bestseller and has been published in more than 30 languages.

In his highly anticipated first novel, Radiance of Tomorrow, Beah (now the UNICEF Ambassador and Advocate for Children Affected by War) revisits his homeland after the fighting is done. Two longtime friends return to their hometown to find the village is in ruins and try to forge a new community by taking up their former posts as teachers, but they find themselves beset by obstacles, from a scarcity of food to the depredations of a foreign mining company to spasms of ongoing violence, and must reckon with the uncertainty of their past and future alike.

Beah discusses his work with friend and fellow author Dinaw Mengestu, author of the acclaimed novel of wartime exile from Ethiopia The Beautiful Things that Heaven Bears, as well as the forthcoming novel All Our Names.