Winner of the CILIP Carnegie Medal 2015, this is a beautiful piece of historical fiction told with heart and humanity.Winner of the CILIP Carnegie Medal 2015. ´What kind of a girl steals the clothes from a dead man´s back and runs off to join the army? A desperate one. That´s who.´ At the end of the American Civil War, Charley - a young African-American slave from the deep south - is ostensibly freed. But then her adopted mother is raped and lynched at the hands of a mob and Charley is left alone. In a terrifyingly lawless land, where the colour of a person´s skin can bring violent death, Charley disguises herself as a man and joins the army. Soon she´s being sent to the prairies to fight a whole new war against the ´savage Indians´. Trapped in a world of injustice and inequality, it´s only when Charley is posted to Apache territory that she begins to learn what it is to be truly free.
