The Home Beyond

Based on extended fieldwork conducted between 2007 and 2019, this book aims to answer a simple question: What is the meaning of home for people living in vernacular settlements in rural China? This question is particularly potent since rural China has experienced rapid and fundamental changes in the twenty-first century under the influences of national policies such as "Building a New Socialist Countryside" enacted in 2006 and "Rural Revitalization" announced in 2018. Drawing upon ethnographic fieldwork, building surveys, archival research, and over 600 photographs taken by residents along with their life stories, this book uncovers the meanings of home from rural residents’ perspectives, who belong to a social group that is underrepresented in scholarship and underserved in modern China. In other words, this study empowers rural residents by giving them voice. This book links the concepts of place, home, and tradition into an overarching argument: The meaning of home rests on the ideas of tradition, including identity, consanguinity, collectivity, social relations, land ownership, and rural lifestyle.

Reprint of the original.

Finalist for the IODE Violet Downey Book Award Samira is only nine years old when the Turkish army invades northwestern Persia in 1918, and she and her parents, brother and baby sister are driven from their tiny village. Taking only what they can carry, they flee into the mountains, but the journey is so difficult that only Samira and her older brother, Benyamin, survive. When Samira finally arrives in a refugee camp, it is her friendship with another orphan, Anna, that pulls her out of her sadness. And when the two girls are given a toddler named Elias to care for, they form a new kind of family. Over the years the children are shunted from one refugee camp to another, from Persia to Iraq and back again, and finally end up in an orphanage, where it seems that they will live out their childhood. Then a new orphanage director arrives -- Susan Shedd, a woman whose authority and energy Samira has never seen before. And Samira’s respect turns to amazement when Miss Shedd decides that she will take the three hundred children back to their home villages to make new lives for themselves. It will be a journey of three hundred miles, through the mountains, and it will be made on foot.

The last school bell has rung and it’s finally HOME TIME! Even though they’re twins, Lilly and David don’t agree on much… except that the last summer before high school is the perfect time for relaxing with friends. But their plans for sleepovers, fantasy games, and romance are thrown out the window when the whole gang falls into a river and wakes up in a village of fantastic creatures.

Avi's suspense-filled, seafaring adventure gets a bold new package!It's 1851. Fifteen-year-old Maura O'Connell and her twelve-year-old brother Patrick are about to set sail on an epic voyage to America to flee the brutal poverty of Ireland and to be reunited with their father.Eleven-year-old Laurence Kirkle, the son of an English lord, runs away from home to escape his cruel older brother and start a new life in a new world.All three children face nothing but obstacles along the way--from stolen money to con men to hunger and fatigue. It seems that none of them will get out of the port city of Liverpool until fate brings them together. Avi's masterful plot-spinning skills create an adventure filled with unexpected twists and turns.