In the Sea There Are Crocodiles - The Story of Enaiatollah Akbari

A bestseller when first published in Italy, this extraordinary book is the story of a young Afghan boy s remarkable and moving journey from his small village in Ghazni province to northern Italy where he finally managed to claim political asylum. The journey began when Enaiatollah was ten years old. Forced to flee his village by a Pashtun gang, he was left by his mother on the Pakistan border, the beginning of a lonely five-year ordeal during which the boy managed to make his way through Iran, Turkey and Greece, working on building sites in order to pay people traffickers, and enduring the physical misery and fear of dangerous border crossings squeezed into the false bottoms of lorries or trekking across inhospitable mountains. A series of almost implausible strokes of luck enabled him to get to Turin, find help from an Italian family and meet the novelist Fabio Geda, who works with deprived children. When Enaiatollah asked Fabio to write his story down for him, little did he know that Fabio would capture the way in which the ten-year-old experienced his ordeal so faithfully and so engagingly that the book would be instantly be taken to reader s hearts....