No One is Here Except All of Us by Ramona Ausubel

No One is Here Except All of Us by Ramona Ausubel is about a remote Jewish village in Romania in 1939 that decides to live in a fantasy world in order to avoid the impending doom surrounding 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.

The novel by Ramona explores history, storytelling, hope and community. It is a big literary debut for 2012.