Published only two years after South Sudan became an independent nation, There Is a Country is both a literary anthology and a cultural landmark.

Bringing together short fiction by emerging South Sudanese writers, it captures a moment in which a country was attempting to imagine itself through literature rather than through the headlines that had long defined it. The stories range across village life, displacement, family, war, migration, corruption, childhood and hope, refusing the flattening effect of international news coverage by insisting on the ordinary complexity of lived experience.

It documents a new nation, but also demonstrates a literary culture already in conversation with itself. The voices are varied in style, generation and subject, yet collectively they reveal fiction's ability to preserve memory while testing possible futures. Rather than presenting South Sudan as a singular narrative of conflict, these writers write from within its contradictions, producing work that is intimate, funny, tragic and quietly political in equal measure.

As with many national anthologies, not every story carries the same weight, but that is beside the point. The collection succeeds because it introduces an entire literary landscape that has been largely absent from English-language publishing. It is an important starting point for readers interested in African literature beyond its established centres, and in how literature participates in the making of a nation.

2013 McSweeney's paperback. Light shelf wear, clean and bright throughout.