The great glory of literature is its ability to transport you, to send you hurtling to places and times other than those created by your present circumstances. The great glory of great literature, however, is its ability to transform you, to completely and inarguably make you, after reading a work’s last sentence, a different person from the one who gazed at the opening lines.

If you’re looking for a book that falls in the former category, get yourself a Seattle Public Library card and roam the stacks: There’s a multitude from which to choose. If a book from the latter group is more your speed, then take that card and sign out Beasts of No Nation by Uzodinma Iweala. Somehow, in a mere 176 pages, Iweala is able to get inside your brain and reorganize the synapses, creating a brand new way of thinking about the world.

But wait. There’s a completely ridiculous word in the last sentence of the previous paragraph: “mere.” There’s nothing mere about Beasts. Nothing. For starters, here’s the book’s first paragraph:

“It is starting like this. I am feeling itch like insect is crawling on my skin, and then my head is just starting to tingle right between my eye, and then I am wanting to sneeze because my nose is itching, and then air is just blowing into ear and I am hearing so many thing: the clicking of insect, the sound of truck grumbling like one kind of animal, and then the sound of somebody shouting, TAKE YOUR POSITION RIGHT NOW! QUICK! QUICK QUICK! MOVE WITH SPEED! MOVE FAST OH! in voice that is just touching my body like knife.”

That voice belongs to Agu, a young African boy who’s been separated from his family as civil war encroaches on his village. Hiding from rebel soldiers, he prays he won’t be discovered. His prayers are short-lived: Within moments, he’s discovered. And, in an act that seems a blessing but eventually becomes a curse, he’s not killed, but taken into the invading army as a boy soldier. There, along with hundreds of other boys, he’s pulled along in a platoon that, following the orders of the Commandant, ravages the land like a plague of locusts.

Marching alongside Agu is another boy soldier, Strika, who can’t speak. But why? Was Strika born this way, or has the war brought this on? These questions hound Agu as the two try to keep pace with their older army-mates, struggling under the weight of guns and the near-constant bloodshed they help precipitate. The two watch out for each other, as they face the danger of starving to death in a countryside that’s been virtually picked clean. They must also keep their eyes open for Commandant, who demands an extreme and damaging fealty from the boys, one that pushes Agu into reliving his past while the land he walks slides further into chaos.

But upon what land is this army unleashed? You’re never told. It’s an unnamed African country, a device that suits Iweala’s tale well. By keeping geography off the pages, Iweala makes the unfolding horrors — the rapes, the murders, the slow crumbling of human souls — all the more unnerving, because this war is no nation’s war as much as it’s every nation’s.

This whole story might be unbearable if it weren’t for Agu’s voice. A rush of African patois colored by lyrical repetitions — “When I am seeing all of this, all of this bombing bombing, killing killing, and dying dying, I am thinking to myself that now, as we are in this bush, only ant is still making and living” — it pulls you through the ever-mounting calamities to... well, not redemption. But perhaps something greater: understanding.

To grasp that Beasts, while fictional, harkens to atrocities that could have happened somewhere on this planet, can only change one’s relationship to the world. It can help us see that what damages one, damages all. And for that, Iweala — and Agu — are in need of our thanks.