Joude Jassouma narrates the miracle of survival in a book. — Le Journal du Dimanche

A sober and precise narrative. — Télérama

This narrative without pathos sweeps away many a prejudice. A worthwhile book. — L’Express

The two years that have changed the course of his life and this epic – in which Joude Jassouma many times could have lost his life – give an understanding of the different phases of the conflict. — Le Monde

With this book, Aleppo, ‘the White city’, one of the oldest inhabited cities in the world, exists and still stands. — Sabyl Ghoussoub

The first account of a refugee from Aleppo who fled the fighting and crossed the Mediterranean to seek refuge in France.

June 2015. Aleppo sinks into chaos. Like hundreds of thousands of civilians, Joude Joussama decides to flee, taking his wife Aya and their little daughter Zain with him.

Three years before, his city had swung into civil war. The clashes between Bashar al-Assad’s army and the rebel forces led by the jihadists of the al-Nosra front and the Islamic State now happened on a daily basis. Joude, a young French teacher, refuses to choose sides in a conflict that is not his. He hides with his family, moving four times to avoid the bombings, before he resigns to exile.

This book tells the exodus of a child from Aleppo’s poor neighborhoods who is in love with novelist Flaubert and poet Eluard, traveling from the banks of the Levant to the Breton coasts, passing through Istanbul and the refugee camps of the island of Leros, The odyssey of an anonymous hero who, at the peril of his life, crossed the Aegean Sea aboard a small plastic boat in search of a safe haven.

The most important migratory crisis since the Second World War is told for the first time from within, through the eyes of an ordinary refugee.