Refugee Ocean

Two refugees find that their lives are inextricably linkedover time and distanceby the perils of history and a single haunting piece of music in this ';breathtaking and simultaneously heartbreaking' (The Montecito Journal) story.Born in Beirut in 1922, Marguerite Toutounghi lives a life of loss and sacrifice. She dreams of traveling Europe and studying music at the Conservatoire de Paris but her familyand her societyhold her back. When she meets the son of a Cuban tobacco farmer at a formal dance, love transforms her life. Together with him, she flees across the Atlantic Ocean. She's hoping for a new beginning, she finds revolution and chaos. Over fifty years later, Nam Rahil is a teenage refugee from Aleppo, Syria. A former piano prodigy who struggles to thrive in Americaand who has lost part of his hand in the warhe dreams of a simple normal life. Moving from Aleppo on the brink of civil war, to Lebanon in the late 1940s, to Havana during the Cuban Revolution, to the suburbs of Washington, DC, The Refugee Ocean ';is an exquisitepoignant, and layered novel' (Eleanor Shearer, author of River Sing Me Home) that grapples with what it means to be an immigrant, shows how wounds can heal, and highlights the role of music and art in the resilience of the human spirit.