A boy. A girl. Two families. One great divide.
When Michael meets Mina, they are at a rally for refugees - standing on opposite sides.
Mina fled Afghanistan with her mother via a refugee camp, a leaky boat and a detention centre.
Michael's parents have founded a new political party called Aussie Values.
They want to stop the boats.
Mina wants to stop the hate.
When Mina wins a scholarship to Michael's private school, their lives crash together blindingly.
A novel for anyone who wants to fight for love, and against injustice.
“It's so much easier to live in a world where everything is black and white. I've never done grey before, but I suspect it's one of those things that, tried once, you can never go back.”
“I've never done grey before, but I suspect it's one of those things that, tried once, you can never resile from.”
“The scariest thing about people like Terrence and my parents is not that they can be cruel. It's that they can be kind too.”
“Bad things happen when good people remain silent.”
“I want to tell him that when we were in the camps waiting for a boat we spoke about what we imagined Australia would be like. Kangaroos, koalas, wide open spaces. Then, when we arrived, we were locked up and the images we had shrank smaller and smaller until Australia became tiny patches of sky beyond the barbed wire.”
“Unrequited love is better than returned love that fails. That way I can dream.”
“Words. And meaning. You can't own one and not the other.”
“But then some people showed me:
That anger is good
But with action is better.
That remembering is good
But with hope it is better.
That change is good
But with discovery it is better.
That questioning is good
But with trust it is better.
That resisting is good
But sometimes those you resist do not matter.
And that standing up is good
But standing up alongside others is better.”
goodreads.com
Randa is a prominent Australian author, academic, human rights advocate, former lawyer and mother of four children. She has been nominated for Sweden's 2019 Astrid Lindgren Award, the world's biggest children's and young adult literature award (she was also nominated in 2018). The award-winning author of eleven novels, published and translated in over 20 countries, Randa writes across a wide range of genres and actively seeks to translate her academic work into creative interventions which reshape dominant narratives around race, human rights, multiculturalism and identity in popular culture.
panmacmillan.com.au
