Talking Location With … author Tom Benjamin: BOLOGNA and environs
Green on Blue
Location(s): Afghanistan
Genre(s): Fiction
Era(s): Turn of 21st Century
Aziz and his older brother Ali live in a village amid the pine forests and endless mountains of eastern Afghanistan. Their family is poor, but inside their mud-walled home, the family has stability, love, and routine.
But when a convoy of armed men suddenly arrives in the village, their parents disappear and their world is shattered. In order to ensure his and his brother’s survival Aziz must join the Special Lashkar – a US-funded militia always hungry for Afghan recruits – and so he departs for the untamed border. No longer a boy, but not yet a man, Aziz struggles to understand his place in a conflict both savage and entirely contrived. Will he embrace the brutality of war or leave it behind, and risk placing his brother – and a young woman he comes to love – in jeopardy?
Green on Blue is a gripping, morally complex debut novel, and an astonishing feat of empathy and imagination about boys caught in a deadly conflict.
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