For seven years Rusty Young, author of the international bestseller Marching Powder, lived and worked in Colombia, interviewing special forces soldiers, snipers, undercover intelligence agents and members of two vicious terrorist organisations - the FARC and Autodefensas. During this time he was both shocked and touched by the stories of child soldiers he encountered. He vowed to one day turn their tales into a book and let their voices be heard.
In Colombia you have to pick a side. Or one will be picked for you . . .
All Pedro Guti Urrez cares about is fishing, playing pool and his girlfriend Camila's promise to sleep with him on his sixteenth birthday. But his life is ripped apart when Guerrilla soldiers callously execute his father in front of him, and he and his mother are banished from their farm. Swearing vengeance against the five men responsible, Pedro, with his best friend Palillo, joins an illegal Paramilitary group, where he is trained to fight, kill and crush any sign of weakness. But as he descends into a world of unspeakable violence, Pedro must decide how far he is willing to go. Can he stop himself before he becomes just as ruthless as those he is hunting? Or will his dark obsession cost him all he loves? Colombiano is an epic tale of rural villages held to ransom, of jungle drug labs, cocaine supermarkets, witch doctors and buried millions, of innocent teenage love, barbaric torture and meticulously planned revenge. Superbly told and by turns gripping, poignant and darkly comic, Colombiano is the remarkable story of a boy whose moral descent becomes a metaphor for the corruption of an entire nation. Both blockbuster thriller and electrifying coming-of-age story, Rusty Young's powerful novel is also a meditation on the redeeming power of love.
Bill is one of the founders of Boffins and has been involved in selecting the books we stock since our beginning in 1989. His favourite reading is history, with psychology, current affairs, and business books coming close behind. His hobbies are reading, food, reading, drinking, reading, and sleeping.
This is a cracker. It’s a 688 page, jaw-dropping story of child soldiers and the drug wars in Colombia. As he did with Marching Powder, Rusty Young has done the research. He worked secretly for the US government in Colombia for four years, so he encountered the sorts of people and situations that he has fictionalised in this novel. He wants the voices of the child soldiers to be heard, and he has made it happen in the most compelling way. This is just the most electrifying revenge thriller and coming-of-age story, and all of us at Boffins highly recommend it.
