What Strange Paradise

By (author) Akkad, Omar El
Short description/annotation:
For fans of Exit West and The Underground Railroad and from the widely acclaimed author of American War comes a profoundly moving novel examining the global refugee crisis through a child’s lens.
Description:

‘Deserves to be an instant classic. I haven’t loved a book this much in a long time . . . What Strange Paradise . . . reads as a parable for our times . . . Such beautiful writing . . . This is an extraordinary book.’ – The New York Times

From the widely acclaimed author of American War, Omar El Akkad, a beautifully written, unrelentingly dramatic and profoundly moving novel that brings the global refugee crisis down to the level of a child’s eyes.

More bodies have washed up on the shores of a small island. Another over-filled, ill-equipped, dilapidated ship has sunk under the weight of its too-many passengers: Syrians, Ethiopians, Egyptians, Lebanese, Palestinians, all of them desperate to escape untenable lives in their homelands. And only one had made the passage: nine-year-old Amir, a Syrian boy who has the good fortune to fall into the hands not of the officials, but of Vänna: a teenage girl, native to the island, who lives inside her own sense of homelessness in a place and among people she has come to disdain. And though Vänna and Amir are complete strangers and don’t speak a common language, Vänna determines to do whatever it takes to save him.

In alternating chapters, we learn the story of Amir’s life and of how he came to be on the ship; and we follow the duo as they make their way towards a vision of safety. But as the novel unfurls, we begin to understand that this is not merely the story of two children finding their way through a hostile world. Omar El Akkad’s What Strange Paradise is the story of our collective moment in this time: of empathy and indifference, of hope and despair – and of the way each of those things can blind us to reality, or guide us to a better one.

Review quote:
Deserves to be an instant classic. I haven’t loved a book this much in a long time . . . What Strange Paradise . . . reads as a parable for our times . . . Such beautiful writing . . . This is an extraordinary book.
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An extremely accomplished and moving novel, but also a gripping page-turner . . . It reads as a type of shattered fairy tale on several levels: the hopes and dreams of the boat refugees, and the superhuman feats enabling Amir and Vanna to mimic his favourite adventure stories – with an ambiguous ending leaving a devastating question mark over the whole tale.
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Riveting . . . Nothing I’ve read before has given me such a visceral sense of the grisly predicament confronted by millions of people expelled from their homes by conflict and climate change.
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This compassionate novel could not be more timely.
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So gripping a page-turner that its brutal message feels organic . . . Through wisdom imparted by various characters, the reader receives new perspectives; the privileged Western reader in particular is confronted with him- or herself in an uncomfortable way.
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Hope and despair, past and present, possibility and unlikelihood, kindheartedness and cruelty — they all fill the pages of this book with an exploration of all the sides of humanity.
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[What Strange Paradise is] simple in the way that novels like [Camus''s] The Stranger or [Steinbeck''s] Of Mice and Men are: brief, taut, cooly delivered but with seas of emotion swirling underneath.
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Impassioned and richly detailed, What Strange Paradise