Boy Overboard

Jamal's greatest wish is to kick a ball at the World Cup, yet in his homeland children are forbidden from playing soccer at all. Soon his family must escape, and a violent upheaval tears him and his sister Bibi away from their mother and father. The two siblings find themselves on a battered, waterlogged boat with other people fleeing their own troubles, and they must carry on toward a distant shore by themselves.

At sea, the situation grows desperate. Supplies dwindle to nothing, and just as hope seems to slip away, armed pirates climb on board. Jamal's dream of reaching Australia and being reunited with his parents begins to look almost impossible.

The story is fiction rather than a record of one real family. Its Australian author, Morris Gleitzman, drew on conversations with people who had survived their own perilous journeys to create it.