Born in Mosul, Iraq, to a wealthy intercultural family, Junis Sultan’s happy, privileged childhood is abruptly cut short by the start of the Gulf War in 1991. With their home destroyed, Junis’s family flees to Germany, settling in a small conservative town near Frankfurt. As his family struggles to adapt to their new circumstances, Junis finds himself increasingly torn between two worlds—fighting to carve out an identity for himself between his family’s expectations and a culture that demands his assimilation. After the 9/11 terror attacks, Junis begins to keep a diary, in which he reflects on questions of family, friendship, religion, and politics. These deep insights gradually expand beyond cultural borders, as Junis begins to explore the universal human needs for bonding and freedom.

Brothers and Strangers is a unique, heartfelt memoir of endurance, forgiveness, and self-actualization, offering a timely message about the importance of acting with openness and love in a global reality.

"From his experience surviving Sadam Hussein's regime and the US-led criminal war against the Iraqi people, to day-to-day humiliations as he negotiated his fractured self as an Iraqi-born teenager in post-9/11 Europe, Junis Sultan's painfully and brilliantly written memoir is a powerful and desperately needed denunciation of enduring orientalism, state delinquency, and war capitalism as much as it is a utopic project for a new humanity."

-Jaime A. Alves, freelance journalist, author of The Anti-Black City: Police Terror and Black Urban Life in Brazil, University of Minnesota Press

"Navigating the choppy waters of a mixed heritage background is never easy, but Junis Sultan surmounts his diverse Iraqi, German, Muslim, and Christian roots with a brave and powerful account of how solidarity and empathy can overcome what divides us."

-Robin Cohen, emeritus professor at University of Oxford and co-author, with Olivia Sheringham, of Encountering Difference (2016)

"A beautiful story which demonstrates that love and friendship may, and ultimately will, triumph over political propaganda and chauvinistic hatred."

-Fred Dallmayr, professor emeritus, University of Notre Dame

"Any migration is challenging, but the forced migration of refugees from war-torn societies is typically framed by sacrifice and suffering. The result is often one of failed lives. However, Junis Sultan, a child refugee from Iraq to Germany, tells a different story, involving fortitude, survival, and ultimately of personal success. Brothers and Strangers offers a counter narrative to racism, rejection, and fear of strangers that has been the typical reactions of receiving societies. By contrast, Sultan's cosmopolitan message of human solidarity has a compelling moral authority from which the citizens of host societies can take instruction and from which the dispossessed may take comfort and encouragement."

-Bryan S. Turner, Australian Catholic University and Potsdam University, Germany