Hinterland
A Novel
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
Two boys are crossing Europe. Only fourteen and eight years old, they have nothing but the clothes on their backs and a dwindling inheritance stitched into the lining of a belt. Their goal is a future they can no longer wait for in Afghanistan, one they hope to find in faraway England.
As they travel, the older, Aryan, teaches his brother Kabir the capitals of the countries they'll pass through-a way of mapping the course in case anything should happen to separate them. Together they recite a list of cities they can't yet imagine, so as not to forget the names: Kabul-Tehran-Istanbul-Athens- Rome-Paris-London. Though their journey is filled with moments of boyish wonder and adventure, the two also confront hunger and exhaustion, cold and heat, violence and confusion, and are exploited for their labor and forced to rely on strangers who shouldn't be trusted.
Caroline Brothers first met these "lost boys" of Afghanistan as a journalist in France, in makeshift refugee camps. Her report on them made the front page of the New York Times, but she wanted to go deeper, to tell their story in human terms. Hinterland, her debut novel, raises questions about the global community's responsibilities toward these children, dispensing with journalistic remove to emerge as a work of incredible empathy, beautifully written.
Hinterland is a gripping journey of love and courage, the story of two resolute spirits not soon forgotten.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This debut novel from Brothers (War and Photography: A Cultural History), a former foreign correspondent for Reuters, is a compassionate and vigorous tale of orphaned Afghan brothers, Aryan, 14, and Kabir, 8, fleeing their native land to escape Taliban atrocities. Along their furtive trek to England Aryan makes Kabir memorize their route: "KabulTehranIstanbulAthensRomeParisLondon!" they work picking oranges in Greece, starve en route to Rome, and are finally stranded in Calais along with legions of other bedraggled refugees, including their old friend Hamid, all of whom scheme with a smuggler to get across the English Channel. "England is everybody's dream," says one refugee. The brothers encounter kind strangers, such as an American couple in France who pay their train fare, as well as cretins who exploit and even molest the na ve juveniles. Despite the string of hardships and setbacks, the brothers remain ebullient, even marveling how "hey must be the luckiest boys in the world" at one point. The skillfully handled backstory details their intimate family life in Afghanistan, and Iran, while the cinematic scope given to their journey underscores its immense undertaking.