What if a thirteen-year-old had to become a father?

When militants burn their village, Joma N'yolo grabs his six-year-old brother, Dobi, and drags them into a world of smugglers, Sahara heat, and a sea that offers either rescue or erasure. With only furtive prayers, their mother's lullaby, and a scarred wooden bird pressed like a talisman to a small chest, Joma becomes Dobi's fierce guardian-trading food for passage, bargaining with exhausted smugglers, and learning that mercy often arrives wrapped in paperwork.

Escaping Hunger is a cinematic, literary refugee novel and coming-of-age survival drama. Vivid Sahara crossings, a claustrophobic stowaway plane, and a storm-tossed Mediterranean crossing sit beside the fluorescent hum of intake rooms and the small kindnesses that keep children alive: a nurse who kneels to meet a frightened gaze, a volunteer who repairs a toy, a lawyer who teaches a boy how to make memory legible to the law.

For readers of refugee fiction and literary coming-of-age novels, this is an unflinching, tender portrait of what one child will risk to save another. It asks, simply and devastatingly: how much of yourself will you give to keep a small life whole?

Trigger note: Contains themes of war, displacement, perilous sea crossings, and child trauma-handled sensitively without graphic gore.