A Long Walk to Water Study Guide

Linda Sue Park grew up in Chicago. She studied English at Stanford University where she also competed on the highly successful gymnastics team. Park later obtained a master’s degree in literature from Trinity College. Her books often explore Korean history and Park’s own Korean heritage, though A Long Walk to Water certainly does not. Her first novel, a children’s book called Seesaw Girl, was published in 1999 and won several awards. She has published several books for children and young adults in the past fifteen years, the most critically successful of which was A Single Shard (2002), a short novel set in Korea that won the Newbery Medal, usually considered the most prestigious American award for children’s literature. Currently, she lives with her family in Rochester, New York.

The backdrop for the first half of the book (the half told through Salva’s eyes) is the Second Sudanese Civil War, which lasted from 1983 to 2005. During this period, the predominately Muslim central government of Sudan tried to impose sharia law on non-Muslim Sudanese citizens in the south. During the late 1980s, military officers staged a coup against the Sudanese government, declaring a new, non-Muslim government. In 1989, military officers staged a second coup and banned all other political parties. Throughout this period, there was widespread fighting in Sudan between South Sudanese troops vying for independence and North Sudanese troops fighting to keep the country intact. South Sudan became an independent country in 2011. While Linda Sue Park doesn’t offer many details about the historical background to Salva’s story, the information is essential to understanding the conflict that sets the story’s main events in motion.

Readers interested in other books about Sudan and Sudanese culture are encouraged to read the novels of Tayeb Saleh, especially his masterful Season of Migration to the North (1966). Dave Eggers’ What is the What (2006) is a fictionalized autobiography (based on a true story) written from the perspective of one of the Lost Boys of Sudan. Richard Cockett’s Sudan: Darfur and the Failure of an African State (2010) is often regarded as one of the best histories of modern Sudan, emphasizing the clash of political and cultural forces that have contributed to civil war in the country.