Refugee Memoir

Forty-five years later, a spiritually tormented smuggler reveals his shocking secret life. Born in a refugee camp, the author sidestepped hallucinogens, gangsters, law enforcement, and conmen, graduating from pot dealer to personal gopher for a world-class smuggler, later becoming an undercover operative for an “adjunct arm” of the US government. Marjan’s path took him to places he really didn’t need to be long before he arrived.

Now married, Paul McAllister and Anna Jaramillo McAllister, continue building their fledgling Estancia into the refuge they’ve dreamed of. Where family, friends, and employees can live a life safe from the violence of daily life in the wilderness of the New Mexico Territory. Surrounded by high desert mountains, roving hostile Indians, and bushwhackers, Paul and Anna struggle to overcome devious plots, far and near, as well as the mysterious villains behind those plots.

Into the maelstrom of unprecedented contemporary debates about immigrants in the United States, this perfectly timed book gives us a portrait of what the new immigrant experience in America is really like. Written as a "guide" for the newly arrived, and providing "practical information and advice", Roya Hakakian, an immigrant herself, reveals what those who settle here love about the country, what they miss about their homes, the cruelty of some Americans, and the unceasing generosity of others.

A true story set at the end of World War 11 as the Russian Army marched against Hitler's troops in East Prussia, and millions of native Germans had to flee to the West to avoid capture, imprisonment and worse. This is the story of how two young women; my mother and her friend, fled to the West, and how the rest of the family also had to leave their farm and home behind them.. Many adventures and close escapes later they were happily re-united in West Germany. My mother met my Irish father, they married and moved to England after the war, built a new life and family and had a wonderful life ...

Daughter of Song is a gripping account of a bold attempt to right an irreparable wrong while spanning dangerous treks through the Khmer Rouge-controlled jungles of Cambodia and the suffering of wasted years behind bars.

In 2006, after his father was killed, Gulwali Passarlay was caught between the Taliban, who wanted to recruit him, and the Americans, who wanted to use him. To protect her son, Gulwali's mother sent him away. The search for safety would lead the 12-year-old across eight countries, from the mountains of Eastern Afghanistan through Iran and Europe to Britain. Over the course of 12 harrowing months, Gulwali endured imprisonment, hunger, cruelty, brutality, loneliness, and terror - and nearly drowned crossing the Mediterranean Sea.

CHANGING PACE IN SPAIN is the entertaining, informative account of one Englishman’s evolution from a fit but placid retiree into a far more dynamic figure. Jim Fairfield has been living in Villajoyosa on the Alicante coast for a year, enjoying life as best he can on his modest pension. Having got to grips with the language to some degree, he begins to feel dissatisfied with his weekly round of walking, cycling and chatting to his new acquaintances and yearns for some chance event to kick-start a more fulfilling life. This occurs on one of his frequent trips to the city, where he ...

Jamal Saeed arrived as a refugee in Canada in 2016. In his native Syria, as a young man, his writing pushed both social and political norms. For this reason, as well as his opposition to the regimes of the al-Assads, he was imprisoned on three occasions for a total of 12 years. In each instance, he was held without formal charge and without judicial process. My Road from Damascus not only tells the story of Saeed’s severe years in Syria’s most notorious military prisons but also his life during the country’s dramatic changes.

In 2010, the al Rabeeah family left their home in Iraq in hope of a safer life. They moved to Homs, in Syria - just before the Syrian civil war broke out. Abu Bakr, one of eight children, was 10 years old when the violence began on the streets around him: car bombings, attacks on his mosque and school, firebombs late at night. Homes tells of the strange juxtapositions of growing up in a war zone: horrific, unimaginable events punctuated by normalcy - soccer, cousins, video games, friends.

Zakia and Ali were from different tribes, but they grew up on neighboring farms in the hinterlands of Afghanistan. By the time they were young teenagers, Zakia, strikingly beautiful and fiercely opinionated, and Ali, shy and tender, had fallen in love. Defying their families, sectarian differences, cultural conventions, and Afghan civil and Islamic law, they ran away together only to live under constant threat from Zakia's large and vengeful family, who have vowed to kill her to restore the family's honor.

Set against a backdrop of Adolf Hitler’s rise to power, the reign of Nazi Germany, and the entire course of World War II in Europe, American Shoes recounts the tumultuous childhood of a young American girl and her family trapped within a country that turned against itself, where human decency eroded and then vaporized. Forced to grow up in the midst of endemic fear stoked by a ravenous madman, American Shoes portrays the breakdown of a society from a child’s point of view, deep inside a land where millions of law-abiding citizens were targeted as threats, and then removed for extermination.

For the first time, music legend Rudy Pérez shares his remarkable journey from a poor refugee kid in Miami to composing the greatest hit songs on the world stage. Named the most successful Latin songwriter in history, Rudy Pérez is the creator behind some of the best-selling records of Beyoncé, Julio Iglesias, Christina Aguilera, and IL Divo.

In 1962, Stephanie 'Steve' Shirley created a software company when the concept of software barely existed. Freelance Programmers employed women to work on complex projects such as Concorde's black box recorder from the comfort of their own homes. Shirley empowered a generation of women in technology, giving them unheard of freedom to choose their own hours and manage their own workloads. The business thrived, and Shirley gradually transferred ownership to her staff, creating 70 millionaires in the process.

One day when Mondiant Dogon was only three years old, his father’s lifelong friend, a Hutu man, came to their home with a machete in his hand and warned the family they were to be killed within hours. Dogon’s family fled into the forest, initiating a long, dangerous journey into Rwanda. They made their way to the first of several UN tent cities in which they would spend decades. But their search for a safe haven had just begun. Rarely do refugees get to tell their own stories. Through his writing, Dogon took control of his own narrative and spoke up for forever refugees everywhere.

An Iranian girl escapes to America as a child, but her father stays behind. Over 20 years, as she transforms from confused immigrant to overachieving Westerner to sophisticated European transplant, daughter and father know each other only from their visits: four crucial visits over two decades, each in a different international city. The longer they are apart, the more their lives diverge, but also the more each comes to need the other's wisdom and, ultimately, rescue.

When Karen O’Reilly’s 28-year-old friend and roommate dies by suicide on a bright New Year’s Day, Karen, also suffering from severe depression, decides that she needs to do something drastic to avoid following a similar path. Six months later she leaves her comfortable western existence behind to work with refugees in Uganda. In this candid and irreverent memoir, Karen tells the story of working with people seeking refuge - from war, and torture, and genocide - as a young woman seeking refuge from herself.

What would you do if you were...Hunted? Despised? A vampire? You'd try to escape. Where do you go when the whole human race is against you? The future. But beware - you might not like what you find. And you can't go back. Dive into an alternate Earth where vampires are real and are the hunted, not the hunters!

When Darcie and Walter Goodwin hear of a new cholera epidemic sweeping the area, they join the Shakers whose villages seem immune to the disease. It's meant to be a temporary stay, but Walter is killed in a riverboat accident. With no family and no money, Darcie has little choice but to stay with the Shakers. To complicate matters, she is expecting a baby conceived before she and her husband came to the Shaker village. Marital relationships are considered sinful in this celibate community, putting Darcie in a unique - and lonely - position.

Days have turned into weeks with no contact from anyone outside of North America, where the power, communication, and transportation grid has been completely destroyed by massive solar flares. In the ensuing chaos, grocery store shelves have been stripped bare and panicked survivors have fled the cities and towns, sweeping across the countryside in a desperate attempt to find sustenance and avoid the violence.

“Writing this memoir is a betrayal.” So begins this electrifying personal account from Danny Ramadan, a celebrated novelist who has long enjoyed the shield his fiction provides. Now, to tell the story of his life, he must revisit dark corners of his past he’d rather forget and unearth memories of a city he can no longer return to. Starting with his family’s humble beginnings in Damascus, he takes listeners on an epic border-crossing journey.