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.

Rosco’s was a dark bar, smoky, lots of taxidermy on the walls, and the first place where Danielle Trussoni heard her father, Jim Trussoni’s war stories. Jim was a Vietnam vet, drafted from Wisconsin at the outset of the war, and immediately volunteered to be a “tunnel rat,” and plumb the labyrinthine and oftentimes booby-trapped Viet Cong tunnel systems. Jim now suffers from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder and Danielle attributes it primarily to his time underground. This past year, Danielle went so far as to write a memoir, entitled Falling Through the Earth, which describes what it was like growing up beneath this man and how his PTSD effected her life as well.

Danielle sat down with NPR’s Weekend Edition to discuss the book. She begins as a 5 year old who just recently found dozens of photographs of Asian men in her basement, which she would later discover were of Viet Cong Jim had killed. “He really cherished them,” she says. This was her first encounter with her father’s PTSD, though they did not speak about the photos until 14 years later, when Danielle was doing a project for a history class at U. of Wisconsin. She interviewed Jim about his experience, and quickly realized that the stories she’d heard as a child had changed, sometimes for the better, other times not. “They were fraught, very emotional,” she says of the interviews. “Jim never felt remorse in the way I wanted him to feel remorse for those deaths, and I guess a solider can’t.”

In researching the memoir, Danielle actually went to Vietnam and retraced her father’s foot steps, even plunging down into preserved Viet Cong cave systems in hopes of understanding better Jim’s mindset. “It did [help me to understand. I could feel the heat, and I could feel the claustrophobia, and I could see nothing ahead but…nothingness”.

Listen to the full interview, in which Danielle further discusses her time in Vietnam, and the difficulties with the actual writing of the memoir.