Again and again they asked him his name. The first time, they chanted all the first names that began with an A. For no particular reason they stopped at Alam. To please them, he repeated the two syllables after them. That was right at the beginning, in Paris.

—from Opium Poppy

In Afghanistan, a small boy becomes a soldier and lives a life of confusion, violence, and loss. Upon arriving illegally in Paris when he is eleven or twelve years old, he falls in with a gang of squatter drug dealers. He is just one of an increasing number of children of war who have been in combat. He is an orphan no one would want to adopt with a name that is not even his own.

As this elegant and sparse novel opens, Alam, a former child-soldier in Afghanistan who has never known a child's innocence, is being questioned by French social workers about his name.

In flashbacks we learn about Alam's life . . . or as much of it as he can bear to remember. War is all the boy recalls of his life before leaving his country. Alam's village near Kandahar was besieged by two main sources of violence: the drug lords who controlled the poppy harvest, and the insurgents and their struggle for a piece of that trade. Coalition helicopters descended periodically, punctuating the silence that followed attacks on the villages, in a hopeless attempt to save those lives that remained. But there was also violence from within: The young girls who attended school, for example, were always at risk from men who wore masks to hide their familiar faces. The men lifted the girls' veils and threw acid on their faces. School was not for girls.

Alam lost most of his family, most of his friends. But not only was his village war-torn, the boy himself was torn from the start. How could he choose between his desire to learn and his fear of the intimidation he experienced from the Islamists surrounding him; between his admiration for his bully of a brother and his hopeless love for a pretty neighbor; between the poverty of village life and the privileges bestowed upon those who joined the insurgency?

At last he gives in to his brother and joins the combatants, but he holds on to the goal of saving enough of the blood money to leave the hellish place that his village has become. He reaches Paris, but never leaves the violence behind. What could the future be for a boy who has seen so much death, taken life, lived in such violence? He could leave his country, but will he ever escape his past?