Shortly after his first child is born, in a small Canadian fishing town, Anjan Sundaram gives himself over to the Central African Republic, a place most Westerners have never heard of. Sundaram knows it vaguely as the country to the north of Congo, where he'd cut his teeth as a reporter a decade before. The year before his daughter was born, its unstable government had been toppled in a coup, and unrest had grown into civil war. But Sundaram seems uninterested in this until he becomes a father. His daughter's birth, he writes, "brought my death into the world; she raised the question of what I left behind when I was gone."

And so, as "Breakup: A Marriage in Wartime" begins, it's clear that Sundaram wants to leave the legacy of witness. Together with a human rights worker, Lewis Mudge, he documents massacres, catalogs the destruction of villages, and recognizes, in what others might assume is a rebel commander's wartime bravado, the language of genocide.

His journey to find and tell these stories comes alive on the page, just as Sundaram himself seems to come alive in the setting. After every dramatic encounter, he conjures an image or memory of home, but that home never feels as vivid as the Central African villages he visits, looking for survivors, or the soldiers' encampments where he risks his life to conduct interviews. Home makes claims on his heart, but the Central African Republic claims imagination.

Repeatedly, it also nearly costs him his life. In a scene that feels like the book's emotional climax, Sundaram and Mudge try to warn the world about an impending massacre at a church, but "the diplomats told us that people were killed each day in this country," he writes. "The embassies and authorities would not stop the killing."

Until they find out that Mudge, a white American man, is staying at the church. Suddenly, the White House was threatening Central African leaders, and United Nations peacekeepers were redeployed to protect the church. Sundaram and the others at the church were saved, he writes, "by exposing the cruelty of our world. Three thousand Central African lives were worth less than one American life."

Sundaram doesn't wrestle directly with this cruelty, nor re-examine the role of his work or the personal sacrifices he's made. But he does feel, more urgently than ever, the desire to go home. When he does, he begins to see that, in fact, there is no longer a home for him. His wife has detached from him, and he, perhaps from her. It's hard to say: Where he writes about home, Sundaram feels detached from his own story. The writing is declarative, rather than intimate.

"Breakup" isn't quite the story of a marriage that didn't make it. But it is a remarkable and needed chronicle of a war gone missing from the collective moral conscience — and, if family and journalism must be at odds, a testament to the work Sundaram is most meant to do.

Jina Moore Ngarambe is the editor in chief of Guernica magazine.

Breakup: A Marriage in Wartime

By: Anjan Sundaram.

Publisher: Catapult, 208 pages, $26.