The Small Ones

From the bestselling author of Aria (a Heather's Pick praised by Margaret Atwood as "a sweeping saga of the Iranian revolution") comes a gripping, timely new novel set in war-torn Iran, about three children who are conscripted to fight and whose only hope for survival comes through unbreakable bonds of friendship.

In The Small Ones, Nazanine Hozar takes an astonishing leap as a novelist, crafting a tightly structured, atmospheric and gorgeously written fable about three young boys, Clay, Amir and Mehdi, and a girl, Layla, who are caught up in a militia-led insurgence along the Iran-Iraq border and forced to become child soldiers. They create a little family of their own even as they yearn to escape and return to their lost homes and some kind of safety.
    Where Aria was a story about mothers and daughters, The Small Ones is about fathers and sons—in particular, unreliable father-figures in the wartime Iran of Hozar's telling, powerful men whose personal violence leads to pain and bloodshed in the world. It is also a tale about surviving such wars, although not without sacrifice. The story centres on two of the boys, narrator Amir and his best friend Clay, tracing a journey where one of the pair eventually finds escape and freedom, but only at a terrible cost to the other.
    An extraordinary anti-war, anti-violence novel that takes us unflinchingly into the heart of deadly conflict through the eyes of its youngest participants, The Small Ones is a searing look at cycles of terror, and the cost of ending them for dreams of a better life.