In her first work of nonfiction, winner of the 2018 UNESCO City of Literature Paul Engle Prize Dina Nayeri--an author whose "exploration of the exile's predicament is tender and urgent" (The New Yorker)--examines what it means to be a refugee through her own story of childhood escape from Iran, and through the stories of other refugees and asylum seekers. What is it like to be a refugee? It is a question many of us do not give much thought to, and...

"Zahra's family left Iran because of political persecution and found a new home in Australia. She will never forget her early years as a refugee, from learning English to navigating transportation. But Zahra is now 100 percent Aussie, and keen to finish university and make her mark on her adopted home. The story includes details on how refugees contribute to their new homes culturally, socially, and financially"--

"The extraordinary true story of Polish-Jewish child refugees who escaped the Nazis and found refuge in Iran. More than a million Jews escaped east from Nazi occupied Poland to Soviet occupied Poland. There they suffered extreme deprivation in Siberian gulags and "Special Settlements" and then, once "liberated," journeyed to the Soviet Central Asian Republics. The majority of Polish Jews who survived the Nazis outlived the war in Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan;...

"Despite decades of Holocaust scholarship, the full story of roughly a quarter million Jews -- the majority of Polish-Jewish survivors -- who escaped Nazi extermination in the Soviet interior, Central Asia, and the Middle East is largely unknown, even to their descendants. Literary scholar Mikhal Dekel, whose father was among these survivors, knew only that he had been rescued with a group called the "Tehran Children." To faithfully reconstruct his...