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 along Iran's border with Iraq, about three children who are conscripted to fight as martyrs and whose only hope for survival comes through unbreakable bonds of friendship.

In The Small Ones, Nazanine Hozar crafts a tightly structured fable about three boys, Clay, Amir and Mehdi, and a girl, Layla, who are caught up in a militia-led insurgence along the Iran-Iraq border in the early 1980s (based on the real-life war of that time) and forced to become child soldiers and martyrs. 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.
   The Small Ones is at heart about fathers and sons—in particular, unreliable father-figures in the repressive Iran of Hozar's telling, powerful men whose personal quest for power leads to pain and bloodshed in the larger world. It is also a tale about surviving such wars, although not without sacrifice. The story centers on two of the boys, the narrator Amir and his best friend Clay, who is both a human boy and a seemingly mythic being of transcendent power. With Amir as our guide, we trace a full-circle journey, following the river Karun along the border, where one boy 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 the repetitive cycles of coercion, bloodshed and war, and the cost of escaping them for a better life.