Dreaming of Hiraeth is a heart-rending tale about a true testament of friendship, drawing on a deeper meaning on what it means not just to survive, but to live. Julian Hayes—the moon: loner, introvert, dreamer—is haunted with the guilt of his actions one scarring night six years ago, when he ran away against his will from his twisted home, leaving his mother with his alcoholic father. Theo Wilson—the sun: bright, bold, realist—was dropped off on the front steps of an orphanage as a newborn, with a record of the group and foster homes he has run from. No two people could be more opposites than Julian and Theo—yet they have more in common than most would believe. Both orphans, living in a group home in Brooklyn’s Fort Greene, they suffer from dark pasts as they try to navigate their youth in the bustle of New York City and pave a worthy future for themselves. Despite their falls, secrets, adventures, and the many obstacles stacked against them, the best friends learn that perhaps the key to their survival is in each other—and that the fight is not in the fall, but the rise. A coming-of-age story about adolescence’s innocence and life’s meaning, Dreaming of Hiraeth deals with the realities of the foster care system, racism, sexuality, mental illnesses, and addiction in the twenty-first century.