A remarkable recounting of a human journey through an inhumane world. What does it mean to be a “refugee”? It is easy for those who live in relative freedom to ignore or even to villainize people who have been forced to flee their homes. After all, it can be hard to identify with others’ experiences when you haven’t been in their shoes. In Hakim’s Odyssey, we see firsthand how war can make anyone a refugee. Hakim, a successful young Syrian who had his whole life ahead of him, tells his story: how war forced him to leave everything behind, including his family, his friends, his home, and his business. After the Syrian uprising in 2011, Hakim was arrested and tortured, his town was bombed, his business was seized by the army, and members of his family were arrested or disappeared. This first leg of his odyssey follows Hakim as he travels from Syria to Lebanon, Lebanon to Jordan, and Jordan to Turkey, where he struggles to earn a living and dreams of one day returning to his home. This graphic novel is necessary reading for our time. Alternately hopeful and heartbreaking, Hakim’s Odyssey is a story about what it means to be human in a world that sometimes fails to be humane.

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 Turkey to Greece.

What choices would you make to reunite your family? “You know, Haidi, we’re going on a trip. A really big trip to find our way to Mama.” In exile and far from his homeland, Hakim finds a bit of hope in the birth of his son. But between unstable jobs and selling what he can in the streets, it’s hard to survive—and impossible for the family to stay together. Reluctantly separated from the woman he loves and alone with his child, Hakim will have to overcome incredible odds and seemingly impossible obstacles to reunite his family, which leads him to make the most difficult decision of his life. Captivating and deeply moving, this second book of the critically acclaimed Hakim’s Odyssey follows the true story of a Syrian refugee as he tries to find his way in Turkey and then makes the perilous trek to what he hopes will be a more settled life in Europe.

Sabba Khan's debut graphic memoir explores what identity, belonging and memory mean for her and her family against the backdrop of history. As a second-generation Pakistani migrant in East London, Khan paints a vivid snapshot of contemporary British Asian life and investigates the complex shifts experienced by different generations within migrant communities, creating an uplifting and universal story that crosses borders and decades. Race, gender and class are explored in a compelling and personal narrative, illuminated by an eloquent minimal style and architectural page design.

Michael Muhammad Knight embarks on a quest for an indigenous American Islam in a series of interstate odysseys. Traveling 20,000 miles by Greyhound in sixty days, he squats in run-down mosques, pursues Muslim romance, is detained at the U.S.-Canadian border with a trunkload of Shia literature, crashes Islamic Society of North America conventions, stink-palms Cat Stevens, and limps across Chicago to find the grave of Noble Drew Ali, filling dozens of notebooks along the way. The result is this semi-autobiographical book, with multiple histories of Fard and the landscape of American Islam woven into Knight’s own story. In the course of his adventures, Knight sorts out his own relationship to Islam as he journeys from punk provocateur to a recognized voice in the community, and watches first-hand the collapse of a liberal Islamic dream. The book’s extensive cast of characters includes anarchist Sufi heretics, vegan kungfu punks, tattoo-sleeved converts in hard-core bands, spiritual drug dealers, Islamic feminists, slick media entrepreneurs, sages of the street, the grandsons of Elijah Muhammad and Malcolm X, and a group called Muslims for Bush.

Whether it's standing on the podium in Seneca Falls with the Suffragettes or riding on the first subway car beneath New York City in 1907, the books in Joy Hakim's A History of US series weave together exciting stories that bring American history to life. Readers may want to start with War, Terrible War, the tragic and bloody account of the Civil War that has been hailed by critics as magnificent. Or All the People, brought fully up-to-date in this new edition with a thoughtful and engaging examination of our world after September 11th. No matter which book they read, young people will never think of American history as boring again. Joy Hakim's single, clear voice offers continuity and narrative drama as she shares with a young audience her love of and fascination with the people of the past. The newest edition of Hakim's celebrated series is now available in an 11-volume set containing revisions and updates to all 10 main volumes and the Sourcebook and Index.

In the tradition of Maus, Persepolis, Palestine and The Breadwinner, Vanni is a graphic novel focusing on the conflict between the Sri Lankan government and the 'Tamil Tigers', told from the perspective of a single family. This moving, exceptional graphic novel portrays the personal experiences of modern warfare, the processes of forced migration and the struggles of seeking asylum in Europe. Inspired by Dix's experience of working in Sri Lanka for the United Nations during the war, Vanni draws upon over four years of meticulous research, includes first-hand interviews, references from official reports and cross-referencing with experts in the field. Elegantly drawn by Lindsay Pollock, and with a real sense of immediacy, Vanni takes readers through the otherwise unimaginable struggles, horrors and life-changing decisions families and individuals are forced to make when caught in conflict.

From Fouad Ajami, an acclaimed author and chronicler of Arab politics, comes a compelling account of how a generation of Arab intellectuals tried to introduce cultural renewals in their homelands through the forces of modernity and secularism. Ultimately, they came to face disappointment, exile, and, on occasion, death. Brilliantly weaving together the strands of a tumultuous century in Arab political thought, history, and poetry, Ajami takes us from the ruins of Beirut's once glittering metropolis to the land of Egypt, where struggle rages between a modernist impulse and an Islamist insurgency, from Nasser's pan-Arab nationalist ambitions to the emergence of an uneasy Pax Americana in Arab lands, from the triumphalism of the Gulf War to the continuing anguished debate over the Israeli-Palestinian peace accords. For anyone who seeks to understand the Middle East, here is an insider's unflinching analysis of the collision between intellectual life and political realities in the Arab world today.