I could see my parents in those Syrians who had had normal, happy lives turned upside down.”Ĭalling her publisher, she said she wanted to abandon the book she was working on and travel to Greece and Turkey to write about these refugees to explain to a young audience what it was to live through the worst of conflicts and risk everything to escape.
“I thought, here were families risking everything to save their children – and it made me think about my own parents, who did the same. “I was watching the news, holding my son and watching other women with their children on the highways of Europe, feeling uncomfortable while I was in my cosy apartment.
“I was originally researching a book on the Israel-Palestine conflict,” says Abawi, speaking from Los Angeles, where she is currently on a book tour. She went on to become an award-winning journalist, herself working in Afghanistan for four years. Photograph: Courtesy of Atia AbawiĪ dual Afghan-American citizen, she was born a refugee in Germany after her parents fled the civil war in Afghanistan in 1981. (Jan.Atia Abawi: ‘I could see my parents in those Syrians who had had normal, happy lives turned upside down’. Agent: Stephen Barbara, Inkwell Management. Newfound friendships and stories of volunteers pulling refugees from the Aegean provide elements of hope in this upsetting yet beautifully rendered portrayal of an ongoing humanitarian crisis. You have the same hearts, needs, wants and desires.” As the family journeys through Syria, Turkey, Greece, and Macedonia on their way to Germany, its configuration varies, most poignantly when Fayed pays smugglers to take his children in a perilously overcrowded boat bound for Greece. Destiny itself serves as an omniscient narrator, a device that helps to buffer readers from the relentless terror, hunger, and danger plaguing Tareq’s family: “To me, you are all from the same world. All three flee the country, joining the endless stream of refugees desperately seeking safety.
Teenage Tareq, his father, and his four-year-old sister, Susan, survive, but his mother, grandmother, and three other siblings die in the blast. In this gripping and heartrending novel, Abawi ( The Secret Sky) follows a family of Syrian refugees, whose lives are changed when one of the feared “bombs that fell indiscriminately from the sky” destroys their apartment building.
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