If anyone was going to write a decent children's book about the pain of being a refugee in modern Britain, it would have to be Leon Rosselson, a songwriter and author who has been an honest radical all his life. Rosselson, himself the son of Russian refugees, is probably the closest Britain has ever had to a chansonnier, a man whose biting, literate songs have commented on the madness of the world for more than 30 years.
If you don't know the name, you may know The World Turned Upside Down, a song that escaped into mainstream consciousness when Billy Bragg recorded it, or Stand Up For Judas, a splendidly blasphemous number that went down well on the US west coast.
But Rosselson has also written funny, singable songs for children and more than a decade ago he turned his hand to writing fiction for them: Rosa's Singing Grandfather was much admired and shortlisted for the Carnegie Medal in 1991.
Now comes Home Is A Place Called Nowhere, a novella dedicated "to my grandson and for a better world" and unswerving in its sympathy for asylum seekers. The Daily Mail will hate it.
Amina lands at Dover with a boatload of refugees who are quickly rounded up by the police. But her mother tells her to run for it, and she does, eventually falling asleep outside the home of a kindly woman who takes her in and asks few questions.
But she is persecuted by the woman's son. She sings to escape his jibes and those of his friends. But one day, provoked beyond all endurance, she lashes out with a knife and goes on the run. Again.
She meets Paul, a similarly displaced child, who promises to help her find her mother. The story takes in raids by immigration officers (a nasty bunch) and imagines with great sympathy the agony of those who flee tyranny and oppression only to fall foul of frightened politicians and nosy bureaucrats.
"They want to know everything and then they don't believe what I tell them," says Leyla the kindly cafe owner who comes from Kurdistan. "They treat me like a criminal. I am here nearly two years. I am still waiting to see if I am allowed to stay as a refugee. I have done nothing wrong. But they treat me like a criminal. They have no respect."
The story moves through ritual and more running towards a happy ending - a demonstration at a detention centre and Amina on the platform so that everyone can hear her story.
Right on? Of course it's right on. But as with all Rosselson's work, it is imbued with optimism and humanity.
"In one frozen flash of a moment, she felt herself soaring out of her body up into the blue sky and she was a brown bird, high above the earth, and her mother was a rainbow bird beside her and together they were flying, flying homeward to a place called nowhere."
· Home Is A Place Called Nowhere, Oxford, £6.99.
