Kidnapped for his brilliance, a 15-year-old electronics genius must fly deadly drones and fight as a sea-going pirate to keep his parents alive. Can he escape and also free his twin sister from the clutches of a major sex-trafficker?

Earlier, he worked as a self-taught internet expert in the mega-city of Kinshasa in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, while his songbird sister aspired to be a rumba star. But, murderous gun-worshippers chloroformed him and whisked him away. Now, he must fight for the wrong side.

The crazies know exactly where his parents and dog live. The leader of his captors, the thuggish Congolese Purification Army, is a seven-foot-tall whack-job handy with AK-47s and oversized machete blades.

Drone Child: A Novel of War, Family, and Survival offers a gripping, inspirational story for mature young adults and older listeners. Performed by Dion Graham, an award-winning narrator of best-sellers and distinguished literary titles, it's told as Lemba Adula's war memoir looking back on his life as a child soldier and pirate some 25 years earlier in the 2020s.

Lemba isn't just smart—he's witty and likable, and you'll be rooting for him and his sister to overcome the scary odds.

Drone Child contains no explicit sex or explicit drug descriptions, and the violence is no different from what would be expected in a war novel.

Junior Boweya, a translator, software localization expert, and businessman in the Congo, fact-checked and critiqued Drone Child. So did Jean Felix Mwema Ngandu, a former Mandela Fellow and a leading civic activist in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.