The Boy on the Wall by Faye Green

This is a small book with a big story about searching for ancestral roots in Ireland. It tells the story of a boy who is jailed for stealing bread during the famine. The main character meets the boy, 150 years later as she discovers the struggles her ancestor faced before immigrating to the United States. The story is juxtapositioned against a family in modern Afghanistan struggling to survive war and starvation.