REVIEWS
The lonely voyage of the child refugee
Seven years have passed since Gulwali Passarlay’s The Lightless Sky memorably documented his experience as an Afghani child refugee forced, after the killing of his father, to flee thousands of miles across hostile lands and seas in search of a fear-free life. His year-long journey, which began with being smuggled into Iran, and included time in prison, a crossing of the Mediterranean in a tiny boat and a bleak period in a Calais camp ended with a triumphant Hollywood-style freeze-frame; after being fostered in the UK, Passarlay graduated with a politics degree from Manchester University, and was chosen to carry the Olympic torch in 2012.
Since that landmark book, the contemporary child refugee’s journey, from war or threat to asylum or a new threat, has been portrayed many times. (For anyone looking to introduce the stories of displaced people to young readers, I recommend terrific graphic novels by Shaun Tan and David Ouimet’s) Some
