The world is facing a significant refugee crisis unlike anything seen since World War 2. The UN High Commissioner for Refugees estimates that there are over 120 million people who have been forcibly displaced, coming from all parts of the world as a result of war, conflict, persecution, human rights violations, natural disasters, and food insecurity. These refugees often face further difficulties in the countries where they seek refuge, such as discrimination, economic insecurity, and detainment under harsh and inhumane conditions. 

Our Book Challenge theme for March, A Book About Refugees, features books that tell the diverse stories of refugees from around the world and explore the complexities of the current global refugee crisis. Each story offers a unique perspective on what it means to be a refugee, highlighting not just the struggles of refugees, but also their strength, resilience, and hope for a better future. 

Refugee High: Coming of Age in America – Elly Fishman
For a century, Chicago’s Roger C. Sullivan High School has been a home to immigrant and refugee students. Refugee High is a riveting chronicle of the 2017-18 school year at Sullivan High, a time when anti-immigrant rhetoric was at its height in the White House. Equal parts heartbreaking and inspiring, it raises vital questions about the priorities and values of a public school and offers an eye-opening and captivating window into the present-day American immigration and education systems.

The Ungrateful Refugee: What Immigrants Never Tell You – Dina Nayeri
The author of Refuge draws on first-person testimonies in an urgent portrait of the refugee crisis that reveals how it happened and the harmful ways that Western governments respond to the inhumane conditions refugees endure.

The Refugees – Viet Thanh Nguyen
A collection of stories, written over a twenty-year period, examines the Vietnamese experience in America as well as questions of home, family, and identity.

Hakim’s Odyssey: Book 1, From Syria to Turkey – Fabien Toulmé
An account, in graphic novel format, of a young Syrian refugee and how war forced him to leave everything behind, including his family, his friends, his home, and his business. This narrative follows his travels from Syria, to Lebanon, Jordan, and Turkey. This is the first of a series.

Seeking Refuge: On the Shores of the Global Refugee Crisis – Stephan Bauman
In Seeking Refuge, three experts from World Relief, an international non-profit specializing in refugee resettlement, offer a practical, well-rounded, well-researched guide to the issue. Drawing from history, public policy, psychology, many personal stories, and their own unique Christian worldview, the authors offer a nuanced and compelling portrayal of the plight of refugees and the extraordinary opportunity we have to love our neighbors as ourselves.

Sea Prayer – Khaled Hosseini
Sea Prayer is composed in the form of a letter, from a father to his son, on the eve of their journey. Impelled to write this story by the haunting image of young Alan Kurdi, the three-year-old Syrian boy whose body washed upon the beach in Turkey in September 2015, Hosseini hopes to pay tribute to the millions of families, like Kurdi’s, who have been splintered and forced from home by war and persecution.

The Boat People – Sharon Bala
Journeying to what he hopes will be a new life with his young son on a rusty cargo ship with 500 fellow refugees from Sri Lanka’s civil war, a young father arrives on Vancouver’s shores, where the group is thrown into a detention processing center and threatened with deportation amid accusations of terrorism.

The Latehomecomer: A Hmong Family Memoir – Kao Kalia Yang
Presents the journey from refugee camp to America and the hardships and joys of a family’s struggle to adapt in a strange culture while holding onto traditions that are passed down from her beloved grandmother.

Solito: A Memoir – Javier Zamora
A young poet reflects on his 3,000-mile journey from El Salvador to the United States when he was nine years old, during which he was faced with perilous boat trips, relentless desert treks, pointed guns, arrests and deceptions during two life-altering months alongside a group of strangers who became an unexpected family.

Running for My Life: One Lost Boy’s Journey from the Killing Fields of Sudan to the Olympic Games – Lopez Lomong
Lomong chronicles his inspiring ascent from a barefoot lost boy of the Sudanese Civil War to a Nike sponsored athlete on the US Olympic Team.