When Enaiatollah Akbari was 10 years old, on the night his mother was forced to abandon him in Pakistan, she insisted that he make her three promises: that he would never do drugs, never raise a weapon against another human being and never steal. The harrowing adventures that follow in this superb little novel are based on the true story Enaiat told to author Fabio Geda in Turin at the end of his perilous, five-year odyssey through Iran, Turkey and Greece, all the way to Italy.
The novel opens in the big, noisy city of Quetta in Pakistan, where his mother is forced to leave her son in a crowded warehouse of displaced persons waiting to contact traffickers to get them out of the country. He and his mother fled their little village of Nava (meaning "gutter"), inhabited mainly by Hazaras, a persecuted Afghani minority, when it fell under Taliban control; Enaiat was forced to watch his schoolteacher executed for daring to educate Hazaras.
His life-and-death adventures are narrated in a low-key, matter-of-fact, childlike way, without being in the least cloying or sensational, and the tale is directly addressed to the author, so that young Enaiat seems to be standing right next to Italian author Geda, dictating his hair-raising exploits. He goes from working for a hostel keeper to braving the bazaar working for a shoe seller, and is rescued from a group of Pashtun boys who steal from him by a group of Hazara youths who become his allies and friends.
Determined to keep his three promises to his mother, paying the necessary bribes and trying to find a trustworthy human trafficker, Enaiat manages to survive. He crosses treacherous mountains, where more than one boy is left behind to die, and endures a three-day journey packed with 50 other children into a truck bed's secret false bottom, sealed in total darkness. He's shuttled from crowded warehouses to underground garages jammed with illegals, chased by wild boars, and forced to cross the turbulent sea from Turkey to Greece with four other boys in a dinghy with a hole in it; the giant waves hauled one of them overboard.
He's stalked and nabbed by the police of every country he has to cross throughout in his slow trek toward freedom, until he stows away on a Greek freighter for three days without food or water to finally arrive in Italy, the land where, at last, people treat him kindly, and where he finally finds a family of his own, in a perfect ending that will reduce many readers to tears of joy and sheer relief. --Nick DiMartino
Shelf Talker: A gripping novelization of 10-year-old Enaiatollah Akbari's five-year odyssey from Afghanistan through Pakistan, Iran, Turkey and Greece to freedom and a new life in Italy.