Stories are more than important: they are vital. And Subhi himself has the stories he invents to explain a life of possibilities and imaginings that exist for him despite his detention in the camp. Jimmie has the stories of her family, painstakingly transcribed by her mother. He has heard his father's stories secondhand. Subhi's mother had rich stories to tell before depression claimed her and Subhi misses them. These will make you smile.Īnd through all of this, runs a thread of storytelling. And you have the deeply human voice of Subhi shining through, describing the beauty of his friendships with Harvey and Eli and Jimmie. But you have the beauty of precious friendships to get you through it. To endure bad food, little privacy and maltreatment by indifferent guards to have had next to no education to be always uncertain that your future contains anything better. To have slept in a tent with fifty other people for all of those ten years.

Imagine being ten years old and never to have known freedom. The Bone Sparrow is a lovely, lovely story. And, in her own way, Jimmie is looking for freedom, too. She's a real girl from outside the fence. And one day, the Great Sea brings him a new friend. And the guards? Well, with the exception of Harvey, they are not very nice people. There's no school because the classroom burned down. And these tokens mean a great deal to Subhi because the camp isn't a very nice place. Subhi believes that his father is sending him secret messages contained in tokens that wash up from the Great Sea of his imagination. They left Subhi's father behind and are waiting for him to join them. He is Rohingya and his mother and sister fled persecution in their native Burma while his mother was expecting him. He has lived his whole life in a detention centre for refugees in Australia. Shortlisted for the 2017 CILIP Carnegie Medal It's about the plight of refugees but also about the importance of friendship and the vital benefits of storytelling.

Summary: Deeply moving book told from the point of view of a boy in one of Australia's notorious detention camps.

Bone sparrow the fraillon