Returning: A Memoir of Two Homelands

Hawre Saleh was four years old when his family fled to Sweden in 1991. Twenty-five years later, he returned — a journalist, a stranger to his own language, and a son seeking the village his parents had described in stories. Returning is the unflinching record of that journey: the joy of reconnection, the grief of what was lost, and the quiet realization that home, for the diasporic child, is something you carry rather than something you arrive at. Written with…

Hawre Saleh was four years old when his family fled to Sweden in 1991. Twenty-five years later, he returned — a journalist, a stranger to his own language, and a son seeking the village his parents had described in stories. Returning is the unflinching record of that journey: the joy of reconnection, the grief of what was lost, and the quiet realization that home, for the diasporic child, is something you carry rather than something you arrive at.

Written with restraint and beauty, this memoir has been hailed as one of the most important Kurdish memoirs of the past decade.