First published in English in the United Kingdom and United States, it is a collection of five stories or novellas, each featuring children at risk and set in a different African country.

The book received praise from major media and several prestigious awards.

Maureen Corrigan of NPR said, "Akpan's brilliance is to present that brutal subject [partisan hatred] through the bewildered, resolutely chipper voice of children; he never succumbs to the temptation of making his narrators endearing or overly innocent.

"[1] While Charles Taylor of The New York Times noted that Akpan was writing beyond witness and did not want sentimentality, the critic had reservations about the author's trying to convey so much through single characters.

Humanist empathy devoid of the distinctly human is finally not art but merely grim reportage.