Alan Swales is a typical British man with a typical British girlfriend, going through life with a mundane job and mundane cares. So when he hears about a need for volunteers to go to Africa, he is immediately pulled to the sound of adventure and getting out of his boring life.
But when Alan arrives in Kugombwala, he quickly realizes that things are not as they have been presented to the rest of the world. Joining the efforts of other aid workers, Alan finds himself struggling to survive in a land where every man and woman takes care of themselves and where people go to be forgotten.
When civil war breaks out, Alan and the other aid workers find themselves wondering whether they should abandon their mission and head for home. But then who will help the innocents? In a land overswept by evil, is there truly any hope? Or are there parts of the world that God has forsaken?
About
Philip Clarke was born in Cornwall in 1967 to a British father and a Danish mother. After an early childhood in Singapore and Hong Kong, he was brought up in the UK and educated at state schools in Crewkerne and Yeovil, followed by the universities of Birmingham and York, where he gained Masters degrees in Engineering and Ecology. He spent most of the 1990s in Africa, both as a humanitarian aid worker and as a tropical forest researcher, about which he has written newspaper articles, scientific papers, and a textbook on the Coastal Forests of Eastern Africa. He then worked for nearly a decade as an executive director of Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders), before founding the war crimes investigation agency, Bloodhound. Falling Night is Phil Clarke’s debut novel, based on actual experiences by the author or his acquaintances in the various wars that took place in Africa during the 1990s, but using fictional characters.