Welcome to Nowhere

Elizabeth Laird's Welcome to Nowhere is a gripping, eye-opening story for 11 year olds about a Syrian boy who only wants to get rich, just as his country starts to fall apart.

What happens

Omar lives in Bosra, a town with a whole ruined Roman city in the middle of it. Before school he works in Uncle Ali's hardware shop. After school he sells postcards to tourists outside his cousin Rasoul's shop, with a rhyme in English that a visitor made up for him.

He has big plans. First a donkey to rent out, then a whole string of them, then his own shop and a big white car.

At home there's Musa, his older brother. He's a total brainbox, he has cerebral palsy, and he gets bullied everywhere he goes. There's Eman, who wants to be a teacher. And there's their dad, who works for the government and says the same thing over and over. Keep your mouth shut about politics.

Then the tourists stop coming. The family moves to Daraa, right as the trouble starts. Schoolboys have sprayed slogans on a wall and been arrested and tortured for it. And Musa, of all people, has quietly joined the protesters.

Omar tells it himself, and he's very good company. He's funny, a bit selfish and honest about it (he admits he sometimes sneaked off when the bullies came for Musa). You watch him start to work out that his dad isn't always right, and that Eman's life is much harder than his.

Be ready for some hard moments. This is a real war told from a child's-eye view, and it doesn't look away. There's talk of arrests, torture and people being shot, Musa's bullies once broke his arm, and his dad plans to marry Eman off at sixteen. Later the war comes to the family properly, and they have to run from their home with barely anything.

It's not a book to hand over and walk away from. But for a reader at the top of this shelf who wants to understand what's happening in the news, and why families end up as refugees, it's a very powerful read. Omar makes it feel close.

What to read next

If they're after another family caught up in a war, Kiss the Dust is by the same author. Tara lives in a Kurdish city in Iraq, and the fighting feels far away until the secret police start calling at her door.