-
Access Our
Best Book Club
Books of 2025!
Summary | Excerpt | Reviews | Beyond the book | Read-Alikes | Genres & Themes | Author Bio
Book Reviewed by:No Safe Place is a novel of high adventure and heart-stopping suspense by a writer at the height of her powers.
Orphaned and plagued with the grief of losing everyone he loves, 15-year-old Abdul has made a long, fraught journey from his war-torn home in Baghdad, only to end up in The Jungle - a squalid, makeshift migrant community in Calais.
Desperate to escape, he takes a spot in a small, overloaded England-bound boat that’s full of other illegal migrants - and a secret stash of heroin. A sudden skirmish leaves the boat stalled in the middle of the Channel, the pilot dead, and four young people remaining - Abdul; Rosalia, a Romani girl who has escaped from the white slave trade; Cheslav, gone AWOL from a Russian military school; and Jonah, the boat pilot's ten-year-old nephew. As they attempt to complete the frantic and hazardous Channel crossing their individual stories are revealed and their futures become increasingly uncertain.
No Safe Place is a novel of high adventure and heart-stopping suspense by a writer at the height of her powers.
No Safe Place is my favorite kind of book: one that brings seemingly different characters together and shows that, lo and behold, they are not so different after all. One that illuminates the connections that the characters have, and that, ultimately, we all have...continued
Full Review
(349 words)
This review is available to non-members for a limited time. For full access,
become a member today.
(Reviewed by Tamara Ellis Smith).
Deborah Ellis has been all over the world. And she hasn't just visited places, she's done things. Big things. She went to Pakistan to help at an Afghan Refugee Camp; she went to Israel and the Ghaza Strip to talk with Israeli and Palestinian children; and she went to Malawi and Tanzania to spend time with children orphaned by AIDS. Deborah has written books that draw on each of these experiences - some fiction and some non-fiction - and at the heart of her work is her deep passion for peace and her unwavering support of children.
She says it best: "It has been a real privilege for me to sit with people in many parts of the world and learn how their lives have been drastically altered by war or disease, and how they try to ...
This "beyond the book" feature is available to non-members for a limited time. Join today for full access.
If you liked No Safe Place, try these:
by Jenny Torres Sanchez
Published 2021
Winner of the 2020 BookBrowse Award for Best Young Adult Novel
A poignant novel of desperation, escape, and survival across the U.S.-Mexico border, inspired by current events.
by Zeyn Joukhadar
Published 2019
This rich, moving, and lyrical debut novel is to Syria what The Kite Runner was to Afghanistan; the story of two girls living eight hundred years apart - a modern-day Syrian refugee seeking safety and a medieval adventurer apprenticed to a legendary mapmaker - places today's headlines in the sweep of history, where the pain of exile and the triumph...
.gif)
Censorship, like charity, should begin at home: but unlike charity, it should end there.
Click Here to find out who said this, as well as discovering other famous literary quotes!
