The Lightless Sky

December 15, 2015
The story of a boy's flight from a rapidly unraveling, murderous Afghanistan. Passarlay was 12 years old when his mother gave him strict orders: "Be brave. This is for your own good....However bad it gets, don't come back." His father, suspected by U.S. troops of cooperating with the Taliban, had been killed during a raid on their house, and this was no time for his sons to stick around. Thus begins the author's tale of his long odyssey west, a journey that would take him halfway around the world. Passarlay and his brother were separated early on, so the author had to survive on the wiles of a 12- year- old, which boiled down to him getting taken at every turn, giving a child's trust to one smooth- talking or brutish fixer after another. Occasionally, Passarlay's youthful voice sounds a little too worldly--"Despair filled my pockets like stones"--but the author provides all manner of small incidents and moments of awakening that leave a lasting impression: "I had never see a blonde woman before," he notes in Germany; "I had had such high expectations for Paris, the city where perfume rained from the skies. And yet all I had witnessed was a dirty, smelly, and cold city, filled with Parisians who shied away from us in horror." Mostly, this journey is a mare's- nest of misery--dirty, hungry, homesick, scared--but Passarlay had one trick up his sleeve. As a clever young kid, he could hide and stow away. He eventually made it to London, traumatized--"The next day I calmly walked into a pharmacy and bought a bottle of paracetamol. Then I swallowed them all"--and the nightmares linger, eight years after. A vivid, timely story of survival. If spies live in boredom punctuated by flashes of terrifying action, then refugees on the run live in constant high anxiety punctuated by flashes of horror and panic.

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February 1, 2016
With the intense national debate about whether to accept refugees, this heartrending story takes readers behind the headlines, with the focus on the personal struggle of a desperate Afghan boy who flees the Taliban and U.S. forces when his doctor father is killed in an American air strike. From the start, the sorrow is unforgettable, as when 12-year-old Gulwali's loving, widowed mother sends him and his brother away from their rural home with the command that he can never forget: Be safe and do not come back. Then the brothers are parted: Will they find each other? Gulwali makes friends on the boat, traveling through the Mediterranean and hidden in crowded vehicles through 12 countries. He walks over mountains and across borders, until, finally, he finds political asylum in England. The close-up detail is intensea prison cell is warmer than the cold outsideas Gulwali faces starvation and filth and the virulent prejudice against bloody migrants. The heartbreaking personal drama stays with you, and so do the statistics: today more than half the world's refugees are children.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)