"The Ultimate Safari" opens with the narrator's cryptic and mysterious statement that tersely sets the tone of the story: "That night our mother went to the shop and she didn't come back. Ever." The narrator of the story, a young black Mozambican girl, never finds out what happened to her mother, or to her father, who had also left one day never to return. The presumption, however, is that both her parents are dead by the time her story unfolds; her people are at war, and her village has been beset by "bandits" that have left the villagers destitute and frightened, and all evidence points to those so-called "bandits" as the cause of her parents' disappearance.

The story that the girl relates is a deceptively simple one: After losing everything at the hands of the bandits who have repeatedly raided their village, and in fear of...