Translated by Rachel Farmer
USAMA AL SHAHMANI left his native Iraq and is living as an asylum-seeker in Switzerland. Worried about his brother in Baghdad and bewildered by the inscrutable behaviours of the Swiss (such as their strange propensity for walking in the woods), he initially struggles to get to grips with life in this new land. He grapples with feelings of loss and questions of identity, torn between his adopted country and the culture he was forced to abandon. But, little by little, with the help of a couple of kind strangers, he starts to find his feet and discovers a sense of home through the natural world.
