Middle East

Finalist for the IODE Violet Downey Book Award

Samira is only nine years old when the Turkish army invades northwestern Persia in 1918, and she and her parents, brother and baby sister are driven from their tiny village. Taking only what they can carry, they flee into the mountains, but the journey is so difficult that only Samira and her older brot …

Finalist for the IODE Violet Downey Book Award

Samira is only nine years old when the Turkish army invades northwestern Persia in 1918, and she and her parents, brother and baby sister are driven from their tiny village. Taking only what they can carry, they flee into the mountains, but the journey is so difficult that only Samira and her older brot …

YALSA BBYA Nominee

Long before the Bible and the Koran, before the myths of the Greeks and Romans were set down, the people of Sumer (who lived in what is now Iraq) recorded the stories of their gods and kings on cuneiform tablets. The world's oldest epic poem is the Epic of Gilgamesh, the tale of a hero who was part god, part man.

But just in the pa …