Excerpt from A Moonless, Starless Sky by Alexis Okeowo, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Now a scraggly group of a few hundred members, the LRA was rapidly losing fighters. High-ranking rebels who had long wanted to escape were sending home their "bush wives" and children, armed with letters instructing the men's families to take the women and children in and take care of them. When, and if, the men escaped themselves, the young mothers were agreeing to marry them with a surprising frequency, confounding families who were left gasping for breath, trying to steady their vision, when their daughters were first taken.

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Eunice grew up in a village seven miles outside Gulu, a town with roads extending like arteries into the countryside. The paths out of Gulu weaved past uniformed children walking to school, men and women riding bicycles as they lugged farm tools and jerry cans of water, and sun-drenched bursts of color, from the lime-toned bushes and banana trees to the rust-colored earth. Mango and orange trees surrounded the spread-out homes of Eunice's family and her neighbors. It was in this serene landscape where Eunice jumped rope with her sisters and eagerly learned to cook from her mother. She liked to perform the dances traditional to Acholiland, and went on adventures with her best friend in the nearby creeks and bushes. Eunice was quiet in class but liked school, and she felt hurt when she had to stop attending in the fifth grade. Her father had stopped supporting her mother, and he no longer paid Eunice's school fees. He had other women who took up his time and his money, and Eunice watched helplessly as her mother struggled to brew and sell a local, potent alcohol to make an income. She soon joined the business, helping brew alcohol and sewing tablecloths. But despite feeling abandoned, she loved her father. When he died from heart disease when Eunice was twelve, the blow felt worse than anything she had ever experienced.

One day soon after her father's death, her relatives heard that the LRA was attacking nearby villages. Many of the children and adults in her extended family decided to sleep in the bushes for a few nights, hiding amid the foliage. Villagers considered it safer to sleep in the forest to avoid the rebels if they showed up on a surprise raid. Eunice heard gunshots that second night. When she returned home early in the morning, she found her brother, sister-in-law, and cousin dead. Everything else was ash. The rebels had burned down their houses and belongings. It was now daylight, and the rebels had done what they came to do, so Eunice knew they were no longer around. But she felt their presence and couldn't stop shivering. The horrific experience seemed to bring the family together. Despite the complications of her father having had so many partners, the women and their children got along well, and Eunice was close with both her full and half sisters.

By the time Eunice turned fifteen, in 1996, life had settled into a surreal kind of normal despite the chaos the LRA was wreaking around her community. The rebels had taken and killed relatives of hers. She slept in the bushes if the LRA was operating close to home, or traveled to Gulu to spend the night in a shelter like thousands of other "night commuters," children who poured into the town from the vulnerable countryside to sleep. But she refused to restrict her life by the persistent threat of the rebels. She was planning on making her third trip to visit her older sister Doreen at St. Mary's College, a boarding school in Apac, just south of Gulu.

It was a great source of pride for the family to have Doreen in the school. "I was so excited to see her," Eunice recalled. She expected to eventually go back to school herself. She packed a bag of bread, cooking oil, and sweet treats to bring her sister, and boarded a matatu, or minibus, for the journey. The first night after she arrived, in October, was filled with gossip and laughter with Doreen and her sister's friends, poised young women who made Eunice feel both full of admiration and at ease. The second night, there had been food, soda, and dancing as the girls celebrated Uganda's Independence Day. Then, in the black early hours of the morning, the rebels came and took her, her sister, and all of her new friends from their beds. Eunice had been sleeping when strange men wielding flashlights woke her up. They were shouting at the girls to get up and open the door of their dorm. There was the sound of breaking glass from the windows. Girls tried to hide under their bunk beds as the rebels forced themselves into the room. They were mostly teenage boys with guns, wild and unkempt, banging on their beds' headboards and dragging girls out from under the beds and into the cold night. The girls were screaming. Some fought back and the rebels hit them, a few others managed to run away. Ribbons still adorned their bedposts.

Excerpted from A Moonless, Starless Sky by Alexis Okeowo. Copyright © 2017 by Alexis Okeowo. Excerpted by permission of Hachette Books. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.