Sea Prayer is composed in the form of a letter, from a father to his son, on the eve of their journey. Watching over his sleeping son, the father reflects on the dangerous sea-crossing that lies before them. It is also a vivid portrait of their life in Homs, Syria, before the war, and of that city's swift transformation from a home into a deadly war zone.

"A young woman from Nigeria leaves behind her home and her first love to start a new life in America, only to find her dreams are not all she expected"--

"In a future where sweeping civil conflict has forced America's young people to flee its borders, Ron Patterson begins to imagine a stable life for himself, but when political divisions become resurgent, he is suddenly on dangerous and uncertain ground"--

"Welcome to the not-too-distant future: Japan, having vanished from the face of the earth, is now remembered as "the land of sushi." Hiruko, its former citizen and a climate refugee herself, has a job teaching immigrant children in Denmark with her invented language Panska (Pan-Scandinavian): "homemade language. no country to stay in. three countries I experienced. insufficient space in brain. so made new language. homemade language." As she searches...

While Flora struggles with how to inform her ex-boss that she is carrying his baby, a doctor refugee from war-torn Syria embarks on his first Christmas season without his wife on the remote Scottish island of Mure.

"Shanghai begins when Daniel Lohr, sensing the Nazis closing in on the Jews of Berlin, leaves his dying father and agrees to flee to Shanghai on an Italian passenger ship. His passage is dependent upon him agreeing to deliver a package to his shady uncle upon arrival. Aboard the ship he will meet a woman, Leah, also a Jew fleeing the Nazis. They conduct a passionate but brief shipboard affair and then the passenger ship arrives. Will Dan ever see...

"After the last American troops leave Vietnam, siblings Anh, Thanh, and Minh begin a perilous journey to Hong Kong with the promise that their parents and younger siblings will soon follow. But when tragedy strikes, the three children are left orphaned, and sixteen-year-old Anh becomes the caretaker for her two younger brothers overnight. In the years that follow, Anh and her brothers resettle in the UK and confront their new identities as refugees,...

"The award-winning stories in Dima Alzayat's collection are luminous and tender, whether dealing with a woman performing burial rites for her brother in "Ghusl," or a great-aunt struggling to explain cultural identity to her niece in "Once We Were Syrians."Alzayat's stories are rich and relatable, chronicling a sense of displacement through everyday scenarios. There is the intern in pre-#MeToo Hollywood of "Only Those Who Struggle Succeed," the New...

"Hilma, an American painter of fifty-eight, goes to the beautiful island of Samos to escape a family tragedy by swimming and hiking and trying to forget. But on one of these swims, she finds a small Syrian girl floating unconscious in a life jacket. Hilma saves her but quickly becomes obsessed with the idea of adopting the girl, whose mother and father, she assumes, have drowned, as so many refugees do. The child's mother, Farah, did not drown, however,...

"More bodies have washed up on the shores of a small island. Another over-filled, ill-equipped, dilapidated ship has sunk under the weight of its too many passengers: Syrians, Ethiopians, Egyptians, Lebanese, Palestinians, all of them desperate to escape untenable lives in their homelands. And only one has made the passage: nine-year-old Amir, a Syrian boy who has the good fortune to fall into the hands not of the officials but of Vänna: a teenage...