The Seventh Circle

Steve Pitt is a Toronto-based freelance writer and an award-winning journalist. He has written many young adult and children's books, including Day of the Flying Fox: The True Story of World War II Pilot Charley Fox.

This collection of eight stories takes its title from Dante’s Divine
Comedy. Not surprisingly, virtually all of the stories have a hellish
theme. “The Forbidden Zone” is written from the viewpoint of a Serb
conscript who has found his niche in war-torn Sarajevo as a sniper
guarding a single desolate city square. Rather than participate in gang
rapes and ethnic cleansing, he prefers to serve as a faceless assassin
of helpless civilians who remind him of people he knows. In other
stories, a Hutu man in Rwanda learns that in order to save his Tutsi
wife he must commit an atrocity; a proud Somali farmer watches his
family and lifestyle slowly disintegrate over the course of the civil
war; and a Christian Lebanese refugee living in Montreal finds himself
caught up in the 1995 referendum.

The theme of nations and people divided is well expressed in these
disturbing and finely crafted tales.