Dave Eggers' book about the life of Sudanese refugee Valentino Achak Deng - who trekked 800 miles (1,300 km) to Ethiopia with thousands of other children when his village was burnt down - starts with a robbery in America.

Deng was separated from his family, saw friends killed by lions, crocodiles, gunmen on horseback and Ethiopian women soldiers, and after all that he's attacked in his own home in Atlanta, Georgia.

What Is the What is a story of unbelievable misfortune. Even the flight taking Deng out of Africa - after 13 years in hungry, dusty refugee camps in Ethiopia and Kenya - is scheduled for Sept 11, 2001. Planes are grounded, and he has to wait a few more weeks before the nerve-wracking but so-long-awaited trip to his new life.

Deng was seven when he left south Sudan during a 21-year civil war that took 2 million lives and forced 4 million people from their homes.

Life as a new arrival in America isn't as straightforward as Deng had hoped. Instead of stepping into a university, he's handing out towels in a private gym and filing carpet samples to pay the rent.

So we get the details of his childhood in bearable snippets, framed by life in present-day America, where Deng is now in his mid twenties.

Along the African part of the journey, there are mundane horrors no child should have to deal with - like the boys learning to sleep in a circle to protect themselves from animal attacks. And being given the job of burying the dead at the refugee camp in Ethiopia where the children lived for three years.

Despite being a very moving book, it's somehow not depressing. What stands out all along the journey, from Sudan to North America, is incredible human kindness. The families who open up their homes to Deng, in Sudan, Ethiopia and the United States, giving food and affection and help even when many of them barely have anything themselves.

And there are lasting friendships made between children helping each other to survive. Achak Achak shows Deng how to fish so he can eat. And Maria forces him to carry on walking when he just wants to give up and die quietly.

FRIENDS

There's a hidden friendship behind this, of course. Deng and U.S. author Eggers got to know each other very well over the four years they worked on the book, attended weddings and funerals together. Eggers learned to ask the right questions, and Deng built up the trust to answer them.

What was originally meant to be a year-long project grew and grew, with Eggers checking everything he wrote with Deng along the way.

It's not a journalistic account. Eggers has already done that. Several years ago, in The Believer magazine, Eggers described accompanying Deng home to South Sudan to the village and parents he hadn't seen since he was about one-third of the height he is now.

Eggers has his own experiences of losing parents as a child. His first novel, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, was about coping as a very young man with his younger brother after the sudden death of their parents.

Speaking at the London Institute for Contemporary Arts, Eggers says he struggled for years about how to tell Deng's story, which is so intimately entangled with the story of the 21-year war between the Khartoum government and rebels from the south.

There were so many gaps in Deng's memory of his childhood, and the man who the boy became had told the story so many times a lot of it had turned into a script, Eggers says.

The Sudanese were feted as the "lost boys" on their arrival in the United States, especially by church groups who had responded to the story of a war that was presented as pitting the Arab Muslim north against the primarily Christian and animist south.

So the refugees repeated the version of events that they thought their hosts wanted to hear, borrowing from each other's stories and leaving out the fact that they didn't actually march entirely on their own. In fact, armed rebels led them to camps where they could grow into soldiers, and some of them - but not Deng - went off to fight even though they were children at the time.

REBELS

It's a very complex thing to untangle all that, and people have got into trouble for not telling the whole truth. I'm thinking about Guatemalan Nobel peace prize winner, Rigoberta Menchu, a Mayan Indian whose autobiography stirred activists and aid agencies to support her during the civil war, only for many of them to feel betrayed when they later realised that her harrowing story hadn't included the fact that she and many of her relatives were themselves in illegal guerrilla organisations.

Eggers describes the boys' ambivalence at being used by a rebel force that hadn't protected their families, yet was in many ways in control of the children's lives.

The author also says he didn't feel comfortable with writing about Deng in the third person, and himself as the first person.

"I didn't feel I had a reason to be part of the story... So I thought the best way was to disappear in the story," Eggers says.

But it's not an autobiography either, because they've melded some people together to make a cast of characters the reader can follow. Which is why they're calling it a novel.

The Sudanese refugees in the United States - and there are almost 4,000 of them - are a close-knit group, despite plenty of internal disputes. They share the same birthday, January 1, assigned to them by the United Nations when it needed a date of birth for the young men's resettlement documents - most were too young when they left home to know when they had been born, if it had ever been recorded.

The war in southern Sudan came to an end in 2005, two years after tension in the western Sudanese region of Darfur had flared into a conflict that would galvanise celebrities and aid agencies into action.

Deng remembers being a child and seeing his village being burnt by gunmen on horseback, and sees it happening again in TV images from Darfur. You get the sense he has been thirsty to tell people what happened to him. "At the same time (my story) would be a microcosm of many people's lives, and also what is going on in Darfur," Deng says.

• What Is the What is published in Britain by Hamish Hamilton, and in the United States by McSweeney's.

• BOOK: Sudan's lost boy goes home, an extract from "It was just boys walking", originally printed in The Believer magazine, published by McSweeney's

• Valentino Achak Deng Foundation

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