No One is Here Except All of Us - Ramona Ausubel

From the award-winning author of Sons and Daughters of Ease and Plenty and the new story collection, Awayland.


In 1939, the families in a remote Jewish village in Romania feel the
war close in on them. Their tribe has moved and escaped for thousands
of years- across oceans, deserts, and mountains-but now, it seems,
there is nowhere else to go. Danger is imminent in every direction, yet
the territory of imagination and belief is limitless. At the suggestion
of an eleven-year-old girl and a mysterious stranger who has washed up
on the riverbank, the villagers decide to reinvent the world: deny any
relationship with the known and start over from scratch. Destiny is
unwritten. Time and history are forgotten. Jobs, husbands, a child, are
reassigned. And for years, there is boundless hope. But the real world
continues to unfold alongside the imagined one, eventually overtaking
it, and soon our narrator-the girl, grown into a young mother-must flee
her village, move from one world to the next, to find her husband and
save her children, and propel them toward a real and hopeful future. A
beguiling, imaginative, inspiring story about the bigness of being
alive as an individual, as a member of a tribe, and as a participant in
history, No One Is Here Except All Of Us explores how we use
storytelling to survive and shape our own truths. It marks the arrival
of a major new literary talent.