In the past few years, it seems as if people are finally taking notice of all that’s going on in Africa. Movies like Blood Diamond and The Last Kind of Scotland, and books like Dave Eggers’ What is the What and Philip Gourevitch’sWe Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families: Stories from Rwanda highlight both the beauty of the continent and the atrocities it has had to endure. Author Aminatta Forna makes a significant contribution to that list with her newest, Ancestor Stones, a novel that takes on Sierra Leonian life through the eyes of four sisters over the course of eighty years.

From Sierra Leone herself, Forna saw her father hanged for leading the popular opposition against an increasingly tyrannical dictator. She fled to Britain where she could only watch from afar until granted the chance to go back two years ago to interview dozens of women about their wartime experiences, noting that women have a distinct view of the war. Where with men, war is all about where they were and what they did, “The experience of war is different for women,” she said in an interview with NPR. “Every woman in that country lived under the constant threat of rape and sexual assault. In my family’s village, on a single day when the rebels invaded, every single woman was raped and some of them were taken away.” It was those interviews that would become the source material for her four sisters and their wartime experiences.

Listen to the full interview.