The book begins in an unnamed Syrian city with a teenage boy, Tareq, surrounded by his bustling, tight-knit family. Abawi researches her fiction like a journalist, interviewing real people, traveling to refugee camps and poring over shocking photographs. And the story behind her latest book, A Land Of Permanent Goodbyes, is drawn from a global crisis that's been dominating headlines the last few years: Refugees fleeing the war in Syria. The people struggling in her novels are young - she writes for teens. "To give insight in a way that I couldn't as a journalist, to give the full story, a depth that the reader could take in and find a way to empathize more with the people who are struggling." "It was a way for me as a journalist to go beyond those 700 words or that two-minute clip," she says. Increasingly though, Abawi has turned to fiction. She's made a career in news covering Iraq and Afghanistan - the latter being the country her own family fled in the early 1980s. How?Ītia Abawi is used to looking at war through the eyes of a journalist.
Your purchase helps support NPR programming. (Jan.Close overlay Buy Featured Book Title A Land of Permanent Goodbyes Author Atia Abawi Agent: Stephen Barbara, Inkwell Management. Newfound friendships and stories of volunteers pulling refugees from the Aegean provide elements of hope in this upsetting yet beautifully rendered portrayal of an ongoing humanitarian crisis. You have the same hearts, needs, wants and desires.” As the family journeys through Syria, Turkey, Greece, and Macedonia on their way to Germany, its configuration varies, most poignantly when Fayed pays smugglers to take his children in a perilously overcrowded boat bound for Greece. Destiny itself serves as an omniscient narrator, a device that helps to buffer readers from the relentless terror, hunger, and danger plaguing Tareq’s family: “To me, you are all from the same world. All three flee the country, joining the endless stream of refugees desperately seeking safety.
Teenage Tareq, his father, and his four-year-old sister, Susan, survive, but his mother, grandmother, and three other siblings die in the blast. In this gripping and heartrending novel, Abawi ( The Secret Sky) follows a family of Syrian refugees, whose lives are changed when one of the feared “bombs that fell indiscriminately from the sky” destroys their apartment building.
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