Homes
A Refugee Story
Description
Homes is the remarkable true story of how a young boy emerged from a war zone—and found safety in Canada—with a passion for sharing his story and telling the world what is truly happening in Syria. A heartbreaking, hopeful, and urgently necessary book.
Awards
- Short-listed, Shaughnessy Cohen Prize for Political Writing 2019
- Runner-up, Canada Reads 2019
- Short-listed, Governor General's Literary Award for Non-Fiction 2018
Reviews
"Both Homes and The Boy on the Beach humanize a conflict that has too often been condensed to numbers, statistics, and nameless victims . . . These eloquent, nuanced, and heartbreaking books — filled with life in the face of death — deserve to be read with all the compassion and courage it must have taken to write them." QUILL AND QUIRE starred review
"From a safe distance, the violence of the Syrian civil war is too vast and grotesque to grasp. How does one comprehend the deaths of 500,000 people, after all? Homes grants readers an intimate view of the war through the eyes of a ten-year-old boy as he struggles to play, pray, and survive as his world collapses around him. Homes stands as one of those rare books that manages to find humanity in the inhumane and, in the end, says more about love than war." MARCELLO DI CINTIO winner of the Shaughnessy Cohen Award for Political Writing for Walls: Travels Along the Barricades
"This charming and warm-hearted book is a refugee story like no other. A captivating read." DEBORAH CAMPBELL winner of the Hilary Weston Writers' Trust Award for Non-Fiction for A Disappearance in Damascus
"Abu Bakr al Rabeeah is brave, his family are brave, and Homes is a compelling, honest chronicle of one harrowing journey across collapsing nation-states. Winnie Yeung does a fine job bringing out the humanity in this — and by extension, every other — refugee tale." CHARLES FORAN author of Mordecai: The Life and Times