As we biked home, I wondered if this wasn’t perhaps the best day in my life. One day or another has to be the best day in a person’s life. Just in case something terrible should happen, then you have this day as a part of you. Today I called Nizar “habib” for the first time. My dearest. This day is the day. 8th of May 2011.

First part of the book tells the story of Mariam, fourteen years old, living in Homs, Syria. It’s before the war. In the second part of the book we meet Mariam when she’s seventeen and lives with her little brother in a bombed-out cellar in the eastern part of Aleppo. Their parents, sister – and Nizar – are no longer there. Now her brother Luka is sick and needs immediate medical care. Mariam decides to flee out of Syria, to Turkey and beyond with a dream of coming to the best country in the world.

Through research and meetings with refugees from Syria, author Bjørn Sortland writes a story about a young girl who fights to save a life. It’s a realistic and heart-rending story from a war-stricken country where the conflict seems irresolvable. In the midst of this turmoil many children and young people flee completely alone in the hope of finding a better life.