Indies Introduce

Fiction

  • Kid Moses: A Novel, Mark Thornton
    Arcade Publishing, 9781628725711, October 27, 2015 (Fiction)

    The story of nine-year-old Moses wandering alone in Tanzania feels all at once as modern as today’s news and as classic as episodic adventures told around a fire. Poverty, death, violence…these are always lurking around the corner. All nine-year-olds, whether homeless in Tanzania or living in a two-story house in Seattle, are essentially alone as they grow and experience the world around them. Thornton portrays this struggle superbly in an emotional and rich tale.

    Steven Salardino, Skylight Books (Los Angeles, CA)

    Big things sometimes come in very small packages. Mark Thornton's KID MOSES is a fascinating, moving, damning look at childhood poverty and homelessness in modern Africa. In a slim 120-page novel, we follow a few years in the life of pre-adolescent Moses, who lives on the streets of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. Through him, we meet kind strangers and evil strangers, other homeless street kids, even some hunter-gatherers who live as their ancestors must have hundreds of years ago. It is a bleak look at how society has forgotten these children and how even the kindness of a few people is not enough to drag their lives back on track (if they ever were). Thornton's writing is beautiful, spare and haunting. For a first-time novelist, he seems adept at putting us in someone else's shoes. And the story he has to tell needs to be heard. As a bookseller, I will do my best to project it.

    Elayna Trucker, Napa Bookmine (Napa, CA)

    KID MOSES is a remarkable novel. What I like best about Mark Thornton's debut is the fresh, original voice of nine-year-old street kid Moses, an orphan in a Tanzania harbor town. Kid Moses is basically alone, and he boldly travels through his world of hot days and cold nights, encountering people who will help him as well as those who are a danger to him, along with wildlife, and the elements. It is a novel about the movement of a small life through the big world, and a child's eye view of the beautiful and dangerous landscape of Tanzania.

    Kathleen Johnson, Prairie Lights Books (Iowa City, IA)

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