Don't Look Back

Achut Deng's memoir, written with Keely Hutton, grew out of a New York Times article about her life. It begins when a deadly attack in South Sudan leaves six-year-old Achut without any family, and it follows her through ten years in refugee camps. Along the way it shows people at their most cruel and their most generous, and it considers what it takes to keep going when circumstances seem designed to stop you.

When a refugee relocation program offered her a way out of the camp, Achut was asked why she deserved the chance to leave. Her answer was simple: she wanted to live. Her new life in the United States brought hardships of its own, some as dangerous as those she had survived. Guided by the strong women around her, who taught her never to dwell on what lay behind her, she pressed on through one obstacle after another, holding on to hope and faith about the future.

Just as the United States began to feel like home, a link to her former life resurfaced and forced her, for the first time, to face the past she had been moving away from.