The Planes at Night

Jos, 1966. Ngozi Okeke is seventeen, a catechist's daughter, quick with figures and quicker with Scripture — until the killing comes to Jos and takes her father and her brother in a single night she never sees, and leaves her with two beloved names and no grave to set them by.

She goes south on the survivors' trains, into a country that secedes and a war that closes like a fist, and a deaconess presses a ladle into her hand at a mission feeding station beside the airstrip. By day she serves the hungry. By night the whole starving country dreams of the planes — the ones that land heavy with bread, and the ones that rise light, carrying the lucky and the listed away to safety.

A prophet at the fence preaches that the faithful will be flown out. Then a seat is offered to her.