“They killed my father, they killed everyone in my family,” a Congolese woman says in this YouTube documentary from German international public TV. “That’s the only reason I became a fighter.”

Most of the fighting in my novel happens in 2025 in the Western and Central parts of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. But scores of militias are now terrorizing thousands of Congolese in the East, especially the northern parts. United Nations peacekeepers have failed, partly for want of full cooperation from the local population. Some of the U.N. soldiers themselves have committed horrendous crimes.