Nowhere Boy

"It’s an absolutely fabulous book published in 2018. It explores the third culture kid experience as well as immigration and refugee status. It is about a Syrian refugee named Ahmed who has lost all his family. He’s made it to Brussels in Belgium and ends up in the garden of an American expat family. The young boy in this family, Max, hides Ahmed for several months and feeds him and becomes friends with him. They have a basement where Ahmed manages to stay out of the way of the rest of Max’s family. There are all kinds of strands that come into this book. The story takes place in the aftermath of the Paris bombings and terror attacks in Brussels, so there is a great deal of prejudice against the Muslim population. We get to see the viewpoints of both child characters. Max is struggling in school because he’s going to a French language school and he only speaks English, so there are ways in which he relates to Ahmed even though he hasn’t had the terrible experiences that Ahmed has had. One of the other threads that comes into it is a policeman who chases them across Europe . Coincidentally it is this man’s grandfather’s house they are living in, and Ahmed has been taking care of the grandfather’s garden. There is a reconciliation there at the end. It’s a great adventure story, and it makes us think. There are interesting connections between characters, and the supporting characters are very sympathetically painted, even when they’re the bad guys. There’s also a connection to World War Two . There is a moment when Ahmed comes across a monument to resistance women who were imprisoned in the Ravensbrück concentration camp . The kids have a conversation along the lines of “the Germans used to be the bad guys, didn’t they”? “Yeah, but now they’re the good guys”. Our perspective changes, but we have to keep fighting against injustice and try to make a better life for ourselves. This book is very European in its outlook. The author is American but she lived in Europe, and the story builds a sense of what it is to be a citizen of the world. I think it’s easier to do that when you are displaced than when you are at home surrounded by people like you. A 12 year old could pick up any one of these books and appreciate it, and so could a 15 year old with most of them. In The Year of the Boar and Jackie Robinson is the only one that is a middle grade novel rather than a young adult novel, so a reader as young as eight years old could appreciate it. With The Arrival you don’t even need to know how to read. Homesick is a little different because it was written by a woman of an earlier generation. It is not as fast paced as we now expect our books to be, and – my copy at least – has got tiny print. But the voice is lovely and very relatable. It rolls along and it’s not hard to read. They are all great books. Many of the books I’ve recommended here seem to be related to the Asian experience. That is a coincidence. I picked them because they really resonated with me. I want to underline that third culture kids are not always immigrants. We’ve talked a lot about immigration, but third culture kids are not necessarily forced out of another country and often don’t think of themselves as immigrants. We haven’t even mentioned statelessness, which is a topic in my most recent book, Stateless . Black Dove, White Raven , which was published in 2015, is much more a classic third culture kid experience. It takes place in Ethiopia in the 1930s, during the invasion. It’s about two American children. One has an Ethiopian father and an African American mother, so he can fit in when he dresses like an Ethiopian, as long as he doesn’t open his mouth. His sister, who is half American and half Italian and white, is more adept at the language. So the pair of them have different experiences in the same culture and it explores how they feel at home there yet can never wholly be at home there. It was based very much on my own experience in Jamaica. And there is the language issue. I’ve lived in Scotland for over 20 years, but as soon as I open my mouth everybody knows that I am American and ask me how long I am staying. The one place where I can be anonymous is in Pennsylvania, and I am a total stranger there – it’s moved on and I’ve moved on. Everybody’s experience is different. There are the same sort of issues about language, home and identity, but if you’re a third culture kid there’s nobody who has the same story as you."