“Falling Night is startlingly real as it recalls the dangerously shifting sands of tribal alliances, western political agendas, and brutality that have characterised Africa’s recent wars. Yet Clarke dares to suggest that inside the worst that the world has to offer, love wins.”
Dr. Nik Ripken, author of The Insanity of God
Alan Swales is no hero and no saint. Bored by a successful, yet dull life in Britain with his girlfriend, Mandy, he decides to become an aid worker in Africa to experience adventure and acquire anecdotes to impress his mates.
Plunged into a civil war waged by vicious warlords and their child soldiers, Alan has to make unexpected choices about the direction of his life as well as his relationship with Mandy. As the situation deteriorates, he hears rumours of a hidden genocide, which leads him on a dangerous quest for evidence in the face of almost insurmountable obstacles.
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.