In mid-2004, an estimated 100,000 children were involved in armed conflict in Africa.

		"BEASTS WITH NO NATION" By Uzodinma Iweala HarperCollins ($16.95)

According to one advocacy group, many were between the ages of 14 and 18.

Some signed up because they were orphaned, others because they were hungry.

A portion of them were forcibly abducted as young as age 9.

Uzodinma Iweala's debut novel takes up the story of Agu, one such boy and gives him a powerful and haunting voice.

As we begin, he has just witnessed his father being killed by local militia, and is running for his life.

He doesn't get far when a rival guerrilla leader called Commandant pounces on Agu and promises to bring purpose to his loss.

Narrating in Agu's agitated voice, Iweala gives us a horrific glimpse into the life of a child soldier, with all of its responsibilities and humiliations.

At night Agu is sodomized by the guerrilla leader; during the day he marches for long periods of time without food or water, stealing from his victims.

It is not long before Agu must prove his mettle by "killing killing." The leader promises Agu that it will feel like falling in love, but the boy discovers it more closely resembles butchery.

Thus, through coercion and threat of torture, the killing begins and it doesn't stop over the course of this bloody novel. After his initiation as a soldier, Agu recalls the ceremony that commemorated villagers' passage into adulthood and finds an eerie similarity between the two.

"The chief is giving him real machete and saying something into his ear," Agu recalls, "until the boy is going and chopping one blow into the neck of the ox. Blood is flying all over his body and he is wiping it from his mask."

In this kind of society, death is not an unwelcome house guest, but a live-in aunt or uncle, forever wagging its hoary finger. Agu doesn't so much adapt to the orgies of killing as accept them numbly.

Meanwhile, the possibility of peace recedes.

"Commandant is helping some people to be dying," Agu describes at one point, accidentally poetic. "I am thinking to myself that now, as we are in this bush, only ant is still making and living. I am wishing I am ant."

This is grim reading, and it doesn't require an epic for us to understand the Beckett-like bargain of forced choice -- of being asked to kill while having a gun pointed at one's head.

Nor does the author bring redemptive uplift into a story where the rivers of blood prove the pointlessness of such gestures.

In fact, the only redemptive thing about this story is the fact that is being told at all.

Iweala, who lived part of his life in Nigeria and attended Harvard University, wrote the book as his senior thesis after reading about child soldiers from Sierra Leone. His mother is Nigeria's minister of finance.

In other words, the novel is an act of pure imagination, which stands as a testimony to Polish poet Zbigniew Herbert's claim that: "Imagination is the instrument of compassion."

If that is indeed the case, then "Beasts of No Nation" is a score waiting for musicians. You will find it waiting for you at your local bookstore.