Middle East

	TASTING THE SKY: A PALESTINIAN CHILDHOOD by Ibtisam Barakat. The author remembers her childhood in Ramallah and as a Palestinian refugee in the late 1960s.
	A STONE IN MY HAND by Cathryn Clinton Eleven-year-old Malaak and her family are touched by the violence in Gaza between Jews and Palestinians when first her father disappears and then her older brother is drawn to the Islamic Jihad.
	THE BREADWINNER by Deborah Ellis Because the Taliban rulers of Kabul, Afghanistan, impose strict limitations on women's freedom and behavior, eleven-year-old Parvana must disguise herself as a boy so that her family can survive after her father's arrest.
	A LITTLE PIECE OF GROUND by Elizabeth Laird During the Israeli occupation of Ramallah in the West Bank of Palestine, twelve-year-old Karim and his friends create a secret place for themselves where they can momentarily forget the horrors of war.
	HABIBI by Naomi Shihab Nye When fourteen-year-old Liyanna, her younger brother, and her parents move from St. Louis to a new home between Jerusalem and the Palestinian village where her father was born, they face many changes and must deal with the tensions between Jews and Palestinians.
	SHABANU: DAUGHTER OF THE WIND by Suzanne Fisher Staples In a year that brings a destructive sandstorm, a feud with a rich landowner, and other disasters, Shabanu, the eleven-year-old daughter of a nomad in the Cholistan Desert of Pakistan, becomes a victim of her people's views of sex role and marriage.
	UNDER THE PERSIMMON TREE by Suzanne Fisher Staples During the 2001 Afghan War, the lives of Najmal, a young refugee from Kunduz, Afghanistan, and Nusrat, an American-Muslim teacher who is awaiting her husband's return from Mazar-i-Sharif, intersect at a school in Peshawar, Pakistan.
	PARADE OF SHADOWS by Gloria Whelan In 1907, sixteen-year-old Julia Hamilton, happy to accompany her diplomat father on a tour of the Ottoman-controlled cities of Istambul, Damascus, Palmyra, and Aleppo, soon finds the journey increasingly hazardous as she begins to uncover her father's true mission and the secret motivations of the other travelers in their group.