For nine years the offerings left at the crossroads of Umuoye have been eaten. Yam, egg, oil in a shell. Set down at dusk, gone by first light. The village knows this is proof, and it knows why: not because the food goes, but because the ground is left smooth, with no print in it of any foot.

The proof was never the food. It was the ground.

Eastern Nigeria, 1930. A boy who belongs to no compound has lived his whole life on what the village puts down for the earth. He knows thirty-one places and four market days. He knows nineteen dogs by shape. He knows how to sweep a crossroads so that nothing at all has come or gone.

Then a mission station opens on the district road. A catechist tells a woman that God is not hungry. And the offerings begin to stop.

What the boy does next, working alone with a bundle of grass and the feet of a dead goat, rebuilds the religion of six hundred people from the outside in, and sets in motion a reckoning that no one in Umuoye will survive intact.

AJA: The Sacrifice is a novel about the arithmetic of belief. About a community that reads the evidence correctly every morning for nine years and draws exactly the wrong conclusion, and about what it costs when the truth finally arrives.

No character in this novel is cruel. That is the argument.

For readers of Chigozie Obioma's:The Fishermen, Jim Crace's:Harvest, and Andrew Michael Hurley's:Starve Acre.