The Best Refugee Books for Kids

A short, plain answer to the question a child asks after overhearing the word once.

Lubna’s best friend in the camp is a pebble she found on the beach and drew a face on.

Seventy-seven words, one night, and a family leaving by boat while the house wishes they would stay.

War arrives during a lesson about volcanoes, and the girl who survives it walks a long way to a classroom with no free chair.

Two girls in a Peshawar camp each find one sandal, and decide a pair is something you can share.

Eight-year-old Garang is put in charge of thirty-five younger boys and told to walk to Ethiopia.

Omar is offered a place at school in a Kenyan camp, and his nonverbal brother needs watching all day.

Hà leaves Saigon by ship in 1975 and lands in Alabama, where she is suddenly the slowest child in the room.

Jude is sent from Syria to Cincinnati with her pregnant mother while her father and brother stay behind.

In 1947, Nisha’s family walks out of the new Pakistan carrying what they can, and she writes it all to her dead mother.

Three children—Berlin in 1939, Havana in 1994, Aleppo in 2015—leave home on journeys that turn out to be connected.

Eleven-year-old Salva walks out of a Sudanese classroom in 1985 and does not stop walking for years.