The Lion's Binding Oath and Other Stories

In this fine collection set before and during the civil war in Somalia, an adult woman, Mayxaano, features in five of these nine short stories. She's a teacher in a teen after-school program in Mogadishu, Somalia's capital and home to more than two million people, big enough to hide one independent, smart, and outspoken woman. Her students are soccer crazy. Though the oppression of a military state may have robbed them of childhood, their passion for the game provides an alternate liberation. A poetry teacher and an athlete, Mayxaano mentors a talented and popular player, Dalmar, another free spirit about whom she worries constantly. Mayxaano relaxes, though, when she falls in love with Bilaal, another teacher. Born of a low caste, she tells him that her life would be over if her identity were discovered. "You don't understand how a steady diet of daily humiliation can muscle you into submission," she explains. This mature debut is graphic—soldiers kill two young brothers for refusing to follow orders—as it reveals how children grow up around violence and war. They still play, learn, tell stories, and try to get along despite threats and the police presence in their everyday lives.