Refugee

Refugee is a 2017 novel for middle-grade readers by the American author Alan Gratz, published by Scholastic. It follows three children whose families are leaving their countries at three different moments, and it moves between them chapter by chapter.

Josef's family leaves Germany in 1939 on a ship bound for the other side of the world, Isabel's family leaves Cuba in 1994 by raft hoping to reach Florida, and Mahmoud's family walks out of Syria in 2015 towards Europe. Each of the three journeys is a practical problem before it is an adventure, because the danger is money, papers, water and the people who decide whether a family is allowed to keep moving.

Gratz keeps the three threads apart for most of the book and then brings them together, which is the structure the novel is built to deliver, and the periods are drawn widely enough that the reader sees the same shape of journey repeated in different dress. The book is written for readers of about ten and up, and its settings stay close to the specific routes families took in those years rather than to a general idea of flight.