Home is Beyond the Mountains

Finalist for the IODE Violet Downey Book Award Samira is only nine years old when the Turkish army invades northwestern Persia in 1918, and she and her parents, brother and baby sister are driven from their tiny village. Taking only what they can carry, they flee into the mountains, but the journey is so difficult that only Samira and her older brother, Benyamin, survive. When Samira finally arrives in a refugee camp, it is her friendship with another orphan, Anna, that pulls her out of her sadness. And when the two girls are given a toddler named Elias to care for, they form a new kind of family. Over the years the children are shunted from one refugee camp to another, from Persia to Iraq and back again, and finally end up in an orphanage, where it seems that they will live out their childhood. Then a new orphanage director arrives Susan Shedd, a woman whose authority and energy Samira has never seen before. And Samira's respect turns to amazement when Miss Shedd decides that she will take the three hundred children back to their home villages to make new lives for themselves. It will be a journey of three hundred miles, through the mountains, and it will be made on foot.

Celia Barker Lottridge is a writer and storyteller who has written several highly acclaimed picture books and novels, including Ticket to Curlew (winner of the Canadian Library Association Book of the Year for Children Award and the Geoffrey Bilson Historical Fiction Award), Wings to Fly (winner of the Violet Downey Award and shortlisted for the Hackmatack Award), Berta: A Remarkable Dog (nominated for the Texas Bluebonnet Award, Horn Book starred review) and Stories from the Life of Jesus (Publishers Weekly starred review). She wrote Home Is Beyond the Mountains after hearing her mother's stories about growing up in Persia and after reading letters written by Celia's aunt, Susan Shedd. A former children’s librarian and a well-known storyteller, Celia was born in Iowa and raised in the United States. She now lives in Toronto.