Dream Land

Lily Hyde (author)

Walker Books, UK: 2008; 278pp

ISBN: 9781406307658

Genres: historical fiction, realistic fiction

Issues: cultural differences, identity, racism, war

All her young life, Safi has heard her parents and grandparents tell her tales of home - home being the Crimea. The Crimean Tatars were deported from their homeland by the Russians in 1944. The time now is 1992 and Safi and her family leave their comfortable house in Uzbekistan to rejoin her father, who went ahead to try and reclaim his father's home.

For Safi the uncomfortable, squalid camp at Mangup-Kalye is a nightmare. Where is the charming village her grandfather has told her about so often? It never rained in his stories but was a perpetual summer - and here it is cold, wet, muddy and comfortless. Safi's father doesn't even want to allow her to attend school. There is a great difference between the longed-for past and the harsh reality of the present. The Russians have been living in the Crimea for nearly fifty years and to them it is also home. The houses that the Tatar families wish to reclaim have now belonged to the Russian families for decades. How can this be resolved? Is there room in this beautiful land for two cultures that were once at war? Or will old grievances poison new relationships, be inherited by the next generation and so destroy a country again?

Lily Hyde has done a remarkable job of capturing the long-term consequences of war and racial cleansing. Dream Land explores the complex nature of peace and cultural restoration and faces the fact that after war, nothing will ever be the same again and the best that can be achieved is a compromise. Full of the loss, pain and longing that infuses families who have lost everything due to conflicts that may have had nothing to do with them personally, Dream Land challenges readers to think beyond the simple dates of history and into the lives of the people affected by such events.

Endorsed by Amnesty International as contributing to a better understanding of human rights and the values that underpin them.