"WHAT IS THE WHAT" BY DAVE EGGERS; MCSWEENEY'S; $26

It's immediately clear that Dave Eggers' "What Is the What" is not a typical novel.

The dark, shadowy face of a Sudanese man stares out from the cover, his portrait printed directly onto the book's brown binding, not on a paper dust jacket.

This, along with the title and author's name colorfully and seemingly hand-lettered, makes the book appear more like a middle-school reader than the heartbreaking novel that it is.

The preface informs the reader that "What Is the What" is indeed fiction but has been drawn by Eggers from several years of extensive interviews with Valentino Achak Deng, a Sudanese refugee.

"This book was born out of the desire on the part of myself and the author to reach out to others to help them understand the atrocities many successive governments of Sudan committed before and during the civil war," writes Deng.

"And though it is fictionalized, it should be noted that the world I have known is not so different from the one depicted within these pages."

AN UNLIKELY CREATION

"What Is the What" is thus a lightning bolt of storytelling — a vivid, often horrifying account that personalizes a conflict most have known only through snippets of news reports.

Such a creation may seem unlikely for Eggers, whose first book, "A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius" (2000), was a sensation. While it was a tender account of the author's life after the unexpected deaths of his parents, it is easy to first consider Eggers — the founder of McSweeney's, the publishing house and literary journal — a writer of witty, self-aware postmodernism.

Eggers' voice, however, is utterly absent from "What Is the What." This is Deng's story, written straightforwardly in first person.

Deng is just a boy when his village of Marial Bai in southern Sudan is destroyed by soldiers from the north, the mostly Muslim Arab region of the country. The northern government, which has long tried to control the largely Christian southern Sudan, attempted to quash the rebellion of the Sudanese People's Liberation Army.

(The more recent conflict in Darfur, while similar in many ways, is a separate struggle in western Sudan.)

The bloody, 20-year war — often called genocide — displaced more than 4 million and killed 2 million, according to some reports. Deng, immediately separated from his family, is one of the many who travel by foot to Ethiopia. It's a journey that had killed many by hunger, disease or the muraheleen, an Arab tribal militia.

REFUGE IN KENYA

Deng eventually makes it to the Pinyudo refugee camp and later to Kakuma, a sprawling Kenyan refugee camp of more than 80,000.

"There is a perception in the West that refugee camps are temporary," says Deng, who lived in Kakuma for 10 years. "But I grew up in refugee camps."

ROOTLESS, CONFUSED

The details of Deng's travels through his war-savaged country are an intense story of the rootless life of a refugee: the utter confusion of the circumstances; the gradual learning of the larger forces at play in the war; and the tender, humorous encounters with those whose spirit remained undefeated.

It's a vividness that only a novel can convey. Those who quibble with what is and isn't nonfiction in "What Is the What" miss the point of the book; this is history, illustrated and brought to life.

STORIES NEED TELLING

In 2001, Deng is eventually resettled in the U.S. with about 4,000 other Sudanese, known as the Lost Boys. (Their ranks also included about 89 "Lost Girls.") Deng relates his life story over the course of a day in his new home of Atlanta, a day in which he's robbed at gunpoint.

Deng imagines he's telling his story to people he meets throughout the day — the robber's boy who watches over him, a disinterested attendant in a hospital waiting room, the gym members he checks in at his job.

Can a connection be made between people with such different lives?

"Whatever I do, however I find a way to live, I will tell these stories," says Deng. "How can I pretend that you do not exist? It would be almost as impossible as you pretending that I do not exist."

HAPPINESS IS RELATIVE

The juxtaposition of Deng's life in Africa with his life in America is a constant source of tension, forcing comparison between the two. His hardships in Atlanta — struggling to enter college, working for minimum wage, the tragic death of his girlfriend — reveal the strange relativity of life and happiness.

When Noriyaki, a friend of Deng's and an inspirational Japanese aid worker at Kakuma, tells Deng he misses his girlfriend in Japan, Deng replies incredulously that he doesn't even have a family.

"Yes, but you're used to it," says Noriyaki.

The book's title is an allusion to this difference. When young, Deng is told a story by his father about God offering the Sudanese either what they know (cattle) or the unknown (the "What").

Deng's never-ending journey into the "What" is a moving, vital read. And now his plight — in all its sadness, strength and joy — will be forever known.