Welcome to the New World

Now in a full-length book, the New York Times Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic story of a refugee family who fled the civil war in Syria to make a new life in America

After escaping a Syrian prison, Ibrahim Aldabaan and his family fled the country to seek protection in America. Among the few refugees to receive visas, they finally landed in JFK airport on November 8, 2016, Election Day. The family had reached a safe harbor, but woke up to the world of Donald Trump and a Muslim ban that would sever them from the grandmother, brothers, sisters, and cousins stranded in exile in Jordan.

Welcome to the New World tells the Aldabaans' story. Resettled in Connecticut with little English, few friends, and even less money, the family of seven strive to create something like home. As a blur of language classes, job-training programs, and the fearsome first days of high school (with hijab) give way to normalcy, the Aldabaans are lulled into a sense of security. A white van cruising slowly past the house prompts some unease, which erupts into full terror when the family receives a death threat and is forced to flee and start all over yet again. The America in which the Aldabaans must make their way is by turns kind and ignorant, generous and cruel, uplifting and heartbreaking.

Delivered with warmth and intimacy, Jake Halpern and Michael Sloan's Welcome to the New World is a wholly original view of the immigrant experience, revealing not only the trials and successes of one family but showing the spirit of a town and a country, for good and bad.

Author: Jake Halpern
Publisher: Metropolitan Books
Published: 09/22/2020
Pages: 192
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 1.05lbs
Size: 9.20h x 7.00w x 0.80d
ISBN: 9781250305596


Review Citation(s):
Publishers Weekly 08/03/2020
Kirkus Reviews 09/01/2020
Booklist 09/01/2020 pg. 66
Shelf Awareness 09/22/2020

About the Author

Jake Halpern is the author of Bad Paper, an Amazon Best Book of 2014, and Nightfall, one of a number of young adult novels. His journalism has appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and the Atlantic, among many other publications. He is also a contributor to NPR's All Things Considered and This American Life and teaches journalism at Yale University in New Haven, where he lives.

Michael Sloan is a printmaker and illustrator whose work appears regularly in the New York Times, the Washington Post, Christian Science Monitor, Boston Globe, and many other places. The Society of Illustrators has honored him with three silver medals for his illustrations. Sloan has lectured widely on his art and also shown his work in solo exhibition. He is also the creator of The Zen of Nimbus comic and he lives in New Haven.