Literary Nonfiction. It's 1974, a coup has just installed a repressive military regime in Ethiopia. A family of five undertakes to escape from Addis Ababa to Djibouti, cross the brutal Danakil Desert on foot. Beth Gebreyohannes, a young girl at the time, describes that grim, perilous journey. Betrayed by guides and robbed by bandits, lost in the desert without food or water, they are rescued finally by a trading caravan of nomadic Afar tribesmen, complete strangers who feed and guide them on to Djibouti. In this port city, other strangers house them until--more than a year after they left--they receive their visas for Canada. This is a story at once gripping and moving, about the endurance and courage of a family escaping to freedom against all odds; a story everyone would acknowledge as a portrait of our times, when so many everywhere run to seek safe haven.
FIRE WALKERS is Beth's memoir, but it is in a way two stories: a harrowing journey across the Danakil Desert, one of the hottest places on earth, it is also an ode to Terrefe's generation's lost dream for Ethiopia. After a 15-month journey, the family came to Canada, settling in Lethbridge, Alta. A forceful reminder of the paths taken to reach here.--The Globe and Mail
Gebreyohannes's vivid memoir describes their year-long trek across the inhospitable Danakil Desert on foot, a dangerous journey where they met both cruelty and kindness before reaching safety in Djibouti.--Sarah Murdoch, The Toronto Star
Their journey not only catalogs a time and place now forever lost but is a sobering reminder that the plight of the refugee is a perennial story with only locations and details that change with time.--World Literature Today
This extraordinary memoir captures one family's harrowing escape from a totalitarian and brutal regime in Ethiopia. Beyond the unspeakable sadness and terror is a testament to the strength of the human spirit in face of adversity, and the amazing acts of human kindness that allowed Beth to survive and tell this story.--Abraham Verghese