Radwan and Um Nabeel live in a small village, Jarat Al-Sindyan, Lebanon. Their four children all left for Canada over the past two decades, but have now booked tickets for their parents to visit them on Prince Edward Island. The flight sets of various memories for Radwan. Three of his siblings had fled to New York during WW1 and he had lost all contact with them. Radwan and Um Nabeel arrive and find their children and grandchildren living a very different life to their own. As the trip unfolds, civil war breaks out in Lebanon and the two elderly parents much choose between staying in safety with their children or returning to their roots. Sparsely written, I enjoyed the descriptions of life in Lebanon. I have vague memories from the early eighties of bombed Beirut and more recently, the explosion that damaged a large part of the city and it’s heart-breaking to consider how many lives were lost and disrupted and the cost to Lebanon as young people immigrated. The author does seem to deliberately avoid discussing the causes of the civil war and the potential allegiances with the various participants that Radwan and his family may have felt. This may be to the detriment of the overall narrative, but creates a universal Lebanese rather than a specific person in Radwan. The story speaks to some of the universal elements of the immigrant experience – alienation between those that remain and those that leave as traditions are abandoned, the importance of first generation immigrants to “fit in” and show that they will contribute to their adopted country, second generation immigrants who know they don’t quite fit in either place.