Adam, the hero and narrator of Sumia Sukkar’s debut novel, is a precocious Syrian boy of 14 with Asperger’s syndrome who visualises moods in colour and paints his terrifying experiences during a war he cannot comprehend. Instead of identifying and politicising the authors of the brutality that he and his relatives suffer, he sees only incomprehensible violence that decimates his family, reduces his home and neighbourhood to rubble and divides his once handsome city to warring enclaves. While exhibiting common Asperger traits – fear of leaving home, rejection of others’ touch, and crouching and rocking when uncertain – Adam overcomes them during his awakening ordeal in a city populated by gunmen who leave walls splashed with blood and streets strewn with dead. Forced out of his protective shell, a toughened but still innocent Adam collects blood to paint blood, pockets a victim’s ear that he finds beautiful, and adopts a stray cat he calls Licorice. The author, a British woman of Syrian and Algerian origin, has used Adam’s collage of horror stories to write a tour de force true to a terrible war.