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Searching... Monmouth Public Library | Fic Brothers, C. 2012 | Searching... Unknown |
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Summary
Summary
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.
Author Notes
Caroline Brothers was born in Australia and received her doctorate in history from University College London before becoming a foreign correspondent in Europe and Latin America. She currently lives in Paris, where she writes for the New York Times and the International Herald Tribune . This is her first novel.
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
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 naive juveniles. Despite the string of hardships and setbacks, the brothers remain ebullient, even marveling how "[t]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. (Apr.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Kirkus Review
School in England is the dream motivating two Afghan boys on their dangerous trek across Europe. Here they come, 15 men, following the smuggler's directions as they cross the river in full flood, the border between Turkey and Greece, part of a current phenomenon of trans-Europe migration. Accompanying them are two little guys, 14-year-old Aryan, the viewpoint character, and his 8-year-old brother Kabir. They are orphans. They lost their parents in separate terrorist attacks back home; an older brother was murdered by the Taliban. The boys have already covered many miles, spending time in Tehran and Istanbul. Now, across the river in Greece, they board a truck that makes an unexpected stop when the brothers are handed over to a waiting Greek farmer. "Here's your merchandise," says the driver. Seven months of forced labor follow; at one point Kabir is sodomized by another truck driver. Then they abscond, hopping another truck, slowly making their way to Italy and France. There's a Hollywood moment in Nice when a married couple from Los Angeles, Iranian-Americans, buys them clothes, dinner and tickets to Paris, but then it's back to reality in Calais, where swarms of Africans and Middle Easterners are living in makeshift camps. Aryan is tear-gassed by the cops and fingerprinted. The only free route to England seems to be the refrigerated truck, a potential death trap. First novelist Brothers, an Australian, is a journalist who has covered this story; she acknowledges her debt to a French language memoir by Wali Mohammadi. The question is how well her account of lost children on the march translates into fiction. How convincing is Aryan? He's a saintly, protective big brother, and so resourceful he qualifies as Superboy, but he's not individuated enough, any more than those American Good Samaritans or Idris, king of the Calais smugglers. A debut that personalizes a humanitarian crisis but fails to fully penetrate others' lives as does, say, Uncle Tom's Cabin.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
Brothers' moving debut novel is the story of two young Afghan boys trekking across Europe in the hopes of finding a better life. Fourteen-year-old Aryan and his eight-year-old brother, Kabir, were first forced to flee Afghanistan after enduring the deaths of their older brother, father, and then mother. They begin their arduous journey to England in the hopes of tracking down a cousin of a family friend who has been living there, but their travels are fraught with peril. Never certain who they can trust, the boys buy passage on various trucks to cross borders between countries and look for shelter wherever they can find it. In Greece, they labor on a farm until an unscrupulous man takes advantage of Kabir's trust; in Italy, they are swindled out of train fare by a seemingly kindly old man; and in France, they find shelter with African refugees only to find themselves actively hunted by the local police. Journalist Brothers based her heart-wrenching novel on her interviews with young Afghan refugees in France.--Huntley, Kristine Copyright 2010 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
Scarred by the war in their Afghan homeland and the violent deaths of their parents and older brother, 14-year-old Aryan and 8-year-old Kabir have little to fortify them on their helter-skelter trek to England. In her first novel, Brothers, a contributor to The New York Times, adeptly synthesizes stories gathered as a reporter in France into a forceful account of two prototypical lost boys as they hazard "the great lottery" of a journey across Europe. Few prizes await the orphans, whose trajectory suggests some nightmarish virtual Monopoly game for refugees, stacked with Go to Jail cards. The boys have barely made it from Turkey to Greece when they are abducted to work as slave laborers for an unscrupulous farmer. Their plight shouldn't get worse, but, with shudder-making intensity, it does. Brothers has the seasoned journalist's eye for the idiosyncratic detail and a sense for the riveting turnabouts that keep readers as off balance as her characters. Empathetic glimpses of Aryan's adolescent yearnings commingle with forays into the downright surreal: Aryan and Kabir are treated to an American-financed shopping spree in Paris, depicted here as a Wonderland-like oasis of mixed messages, where humanitarians dispense free meals by day and the police lob tear gas by night.
Library Journal Review
Inspired by the author's front-page New York Times piece; a "compelling and empathetic account" of two Afghan orphans aiming for Britain. (LJ 12/11) (c) Copyright 2012. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.