Deborah Ellis

"All girls [should read] The Breadwinner by Deborah Ellis." — Malala Yousafzai, New York Times

The first book in Deborah Ellis's riveting Breadwinner series is an award-winning novel about loyalty, survival, families and friendship under extraordinary circumstances during the Taliban's rule in Afghanistan in the late 1990s.

Eleven-year-old Parvana lives with her family in one room of a bombed-out apartment

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This high-interest, low-vocabulary novella is intended for adult basic education (ABE) and English as a Second Language (ESL) readers. Duncan is very angry. Tess, his wife, has turned their dining room into a library. Then disaster strikes: Tess gets sick, and soon Duncan is alone. Right away, he clears out the books he hates. Suddenly, things in the house start to move around by themselves. A strange message appears in the kitchen. Is the house

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After her critically acclaimed books of interviews with Afghan, Iraqi, Israeli and Palestinian children, Deborah Ellis turns her attention closer to home. For two years she traveled across the United States and Canada interviewing Native children. The result is a compelling collection of interviews with children aged nine to eighteen. They come from all over the continent, from Iqaluit to Texas, Haida Gwaai to North Carolina, and their stories run...

A war is raging in Afghanistan as a coalition of Western forces tries to oust the Taliban by bombing the country. Parvana's father has died, and her mother, sister and brother have gone to a faraway wedding, not knowing what has happened to the father. Parvana doesn't know where they are. She just knows she has to find them. She sets out alone, masquerading as a boy, her journey becoming more perilous as the bombs begin to fall. Making her way across...

Since its publication in 2000, hundreds of thousands of children all over the world have read and loved The Breadwinner. By reading the story of eleven-year-old Parvana and her struggles living under the terror of the Taliban, young readers came to know the plight of children in Afghanistan. But what has happened to Afghanistan's children since the fall of the Taliban in 2001? In 2011, Deborah Ellis went to Kabul to find out. She interviewed children...

For twelve-year-old Diego and his family, home is a prison in Cochabamba, Bolivia. His parents farmed coca, a traditional Bolivian medicinal plant, until they got caught in the middle of the government's war on drugs and were mistakenly convicted of drug possession. Diego's parents are locked up, but he can come and go, to school, to the market to sell his mother's handknitted goods, and to work as a "taxi," running errands for other prisoners. But...

USBBY Outstanding International Books Honor ListIn this book, Deborah Ellis turns her attention to the most tragic victims of the Iraq war -- Iraqi children. She interviews young people, mostly refugees living in Jordan, but also a few who are trying to build new lives in North America. Some families have left Iraq with money; others are penniless and ill or disabled. Most of the children have parents who are working illegally or not at all, and the...

The seated child. With a single powerful image, Deborah Ellis draws our attention to nine children and the situations they find themselves in, often through no fault of their own. In each story, a child makes a decision and takes action, be that a tiny gesture or a life-altering choice. Afar is a child laborer in a chair factory and longs to go to school. Sue sits on a swing as she and her brother wait to have a supervised visit with their father...

In this powerful collection of short stories, children around the world turn eleven and take a step into their futures. Each one is changed in ways both big and small. Annoyed at having to walk his sister's dog on his birthday, Connor heads into an undeveloped subdivision, where he comes across chilling evidence of a stranger's unhappiness. A girl sneaks away from her class camping trip to a local conservation area and experiences, for the first...

Deborah Ellis has been widely praised for her gripping books portraying the plight of children in war-torn countries. Now she turns her attention closer to home, to the children whose parents are soldiers fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq. In frank and revealing interviews, they talk about how this experience has marked and shaped their lives. The children, who range in age from 7 to 17, come from all over North America. They were interviewed on military...