Name: No One is Here Except All of Us
ISBN: 9781594487941

Ramona Ausubel

When an isolated Jewish village in Romania is threatened by war in 1939, the suggestions of a young child and a mysterious stranger who has washed up on the riverbank compels the community to reinvent itself while completely detaching from the known world, a creative plan that involves disturbing reassignments of jobs and families. 25,000 first printing.

No One is Here Except All of Us

Erin O’Donnell

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.