The scale of the atrocity of war is often so overwhelming that it is only through focusing on an individual that we can go part of the way to feeling the physical and emotional toll that it takes. A Marker to Measure Drift is Jacqueline’s story, an achingly personal journey through the carnage of Charles Taylor’s Liberia. When we first meet her she is eking out a life on an Aegean holiday island. We don’t know much about her except that she is near-starving, finding treasures among the tourist trash, sleeping “like a rat” in a beach-side cave, ever-wary of a group of Senegalese men whose attention she has inadvertently captured.
She is operating almost in a state of fugue. Existence – survival – is automatic. She is