No One is Here Except All of Us

In the aftermath of a revolution that has plunged her country into chaos, thirteen-year-old Emma’s small corner of the world is shattered after her dissident parents' death in a car crash. Before she can make sense of her new circumstances, an older woman arrives to claim her, alleging to be her grandmother.   When the two travel to what will be her new home in a distant town, Emma is mystified by her guardian, a woman who can read fortunes in coffee dregs, inflict and heal pain at will, and even control the minds of her enemies; she also shares her home with the ghost of her dead husband. But Emma soon learns that there are other reasons her grandmother is treated as an outcast by her neighbors.   Like a witch’s apprentice, Emma learns to accept the logic of her grandmother's secluded life, and as she uncovers the older woman's story—from the traumas of the Second World War to the Holocaust and the reeducation camps of the communist system—Emma comes to see that sometimes a reality shaped by magic is the only means of finding freedom in the face of terror, manipulation, and fear. In The Bone Fire, Hungary's literary star introduces an indelible young heroine, weaving together old-world mysticism and contemporary politics to uncover the soul of a war-scarred land and its people.

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.

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.

Major new literary talent Ramona Ausubel combines the otherworldly wisdom of her much-loved debut novel, No One Is Here Except All of Us, with the precision of the short-story form. A Guide toBeing Born is organized around the stages of life—love, conception, gestation, birth—and the transformations that happen as people experience deeply altering life events, falling in love, becoming parents, looking toward the end of life. In each of these eleven stories Ausubel’s stunning imagination and humor are moving, entertaining, and provocative, leading readers to see the familiar world in a new way.

In “Atria” a pregnant teenager believes she will give birth to any number of strange animals rather than a human baby; in “Catch and Release” a girl discovers the ghost of a Civil War hero living in the woods behind her house; and in “Tributaries” people grow a new arm each time they fall in love. Funny, surprising, and delightfully strange—all the stories have a strong emotional core; Ausubel’s primary concern is always love, in all its manifestations.