This debut novel by Australian journalist Caroline Brothers puts the humanity back into our news cycle. After the Taliban kills almost every member of their family, Aryan and his eight-year-old brother Kabir set off via Kabul, Tehran, Istanbul, Athens, Rome, Paris and London in search of an education and sanctuary. Instead they encounter slave labour, police brutality, illicit borders and the exile’s curse, invisibility. In a recent interview, Brothers, who works for the International Herald Tribune in Paris, claimed she wanted to tell ‘’an immense story’, one that ‘cannot be contained in journalism’.

By taking us into the vestibules of Europe’s modern-day underground railroad, the book challenges how quickly we might rebuff a homeless child begging on the streets of Rome. Brothers’ argument implicitly goes that if we only knew their story then people and governments could not fail to be more sympathetic.

Vince Chadwick