Unimaginable yet wonderful. Horrifying yet uplifting. Confounding yet inspirational. Depressing yet moving. This is Running the Rift, a story that is based on horrific events in our recent history, yet allows one young man to show the reader that in the face of horror and brutality there can still be human warmth, forgiveness and redemption.

Jean Patrick Nkuba is a young Tutsi boy living in Rwanda. It is 1984 and he lives with his happy and loving family in the town where his father teaches school. He loves to run, and along with his older brother Roger, they run both for the challenge and just for the fun of it. However, his idyllic life faces upheaval when his father dies suddenly, and he and his family are forced to go to their uncle's home where there is a lot to get used to. There is no running water or electricity and little money. But his uncle is a good man and the family do well living on the shores of Lake Kivu, fishing for a living.

A very clever boy and with his exceptional results at school, Jean Patrick is offered one of the very few high school scholarships available to Tutsi students. He comes to the notice of Coach, a Hutu, who sees the potential in Jean Patrick's running ability and takes him under his wing. This is to prove a very conflicting relationship for Jean Patrick, who tries throughout to remain loyal to his family and his Tutsi ethnicity.

Jean Patrick is forced to make choices during his high school years which conflict with both his upbringing and his generous and forgiving nature. The decisions he makes have life changing and life threatening consequences. As Hutu—Tutsi relations become worse during his high school years, Jean Patrick is offered an Identification Card by Coach with the all-important ethnicity box ticked as Hutu. He wants to defend his rights as a Tutsi, just as his brother Roger has done by joining the RPF (Tutsi rebels), but he also wants to be able to run—unmolested and free. Jean Patrick, with his brother's blessing, decides to do whatever it takes to run in the Olympics. If he can attain this wonderful ambition, he can take every Tutsi with him and run for his people and the country he still loves.

As their country is falling into despair and life for the Tutsi is becoming increasingly hopeless, Jean Patrick meets Bea, the daughter of a Hutu journalist known as a dissident by the Government, and they fall in love. Together they watch their country and their lives fall towards the ultimate horror of the slaughter that is now inevitable.

During that period in the early 1990s, approximately 800,000 Tutsis were killed in Rwanda. The country had suffered many years of escalating friction between the Hutu and the Tutsi people. When the violence finally erupted, there was little the Tutsi people could do to survive. Sadly, the slaughter of so many innocents was not unexpected by world leaders, yet they chose not to interfere.

Naomi Benaron's descriptions of Rwanda are mesmerising, and seem to pull the reader into the lush greenness of the hills and into the sparkling stillness of the lakes where Jean Patrick runs and runs and runs. She provides the reader with insight into this horrific time in our history, and shows the violence and horror of this time without being gratuitous. She also shows that even in the face of such atrocity, it is still possible that dreams, kindness and generosity can remain part of the human character.

Judy Lim lives on a few acres on the outskirts of Melbourne, Australia, with two dogs, three cats, a husband and one of three children. The other two living in various parts of the world at any given time. After many years teaching preschool children, and a few different University degrees, she has settled into the life of a Youth Services Librarian with every spare moment dedicated to reading.