A Long Walk to Water
Linda Sue Park (2010)
“A true story of survival across two timelines: a boy walks 1,500 miles across a war-torn continent so that, decades later, a girl will not have to.”
Short Summary
A Long Walk to Water tells two parallel true stories set in Sudan. In 1985, eleven-year-old Salva Dut flees the Second Sudanese Civil War and walks thousands of miles through desert and danger to a refugee camp. In 2008, eleven-year-old Nya walks eight hours every day to fetch water from a pond that makes her family sick. The timelines converge when Salva, now an adult leading a nonprofit called Water for Sudan, arrives in Nya's village to drill a well. They never meet on the page, but his survival made her life possible.
Detailed Summary
Linda Sue Park weaves two narratives across twenty-three years and the same land. The first follows Salva Dut, a real person, whose story Park reconstructed from interviews. In 1985, Salva is eleven years old and attending school in southern Sudan when gunshots shatter his afternoon. His teacher sen...