In 2010, I met a Somali refugee in Cape Town. His name was Asad Abdullahi. He told the tale of his life with a richness bordering on genius and I was hooked. I spent the next two years tracing his childhood footsteps through the Horn of Africa, looking for anyone and everyone he had encountered. In the course of writing a book about him, I read countless other books about exile, migration, and human beings on the move. My five recommendations are among the books that helped me imagine the experience of exile best.
My mother read this book to me over the course of several weekday afternoons. I was nine, maybe ten. The book’s protagonist, David, is a boy who escapes from a concentration camp somewhere in Eastern Europe and walks to Denmark in search of his mother. Lying next to my own mother, on her bed, listening to her voice, cocooned by her love, I identified so very powerfully with this unrooted, solitary, questing boy. It stirred me more than anything else I read as a child. There is something in a refugee’s tale that is so primal, so hard to shake off. There but by the grace of God go I, I thought, every time my mother opened the book to read some more.
This is the story of a young boy's journey through Europe after escaping from the camp where he has lived all his life. Faced with a host of new experiences, David gradually begins to understand the world around him.
As a white man who writes intimate books about black people, I find that this book raises questions that go to the core of what I do. The author is Dave Eggers, a white American. The book’s protagonist and narrator, Valentino Achak Deng, is a refugee from Sudan’s civil war. Eggers offers the book as a novel. Yet Deng is not a fictional character. He is a living person. And when the book came out, he promoted it as his true story. What Is the Whatwas published in 2006. So much has changed since then. Is a collaborative project like Eggers’ and Deng’s still possible, in which the line between fiction and nonfiction, and between a white writer and a black voice, is blurred? Deng’s and Eggers’ collaboration was powerful. I hope it isn’t the last of its kind.
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • The epic novel based on the life of Valentino Achak Deng who, along with thousands of other children —the so-called Lost Boys—was forced to leave his village in Sudan at the age of seven and trek hundreds of miles by foot, pursued by militias, government bombers, and wild animals, crossing the deserts of three countries to find freedom.
When he finally is resettled in the United States, he finds a life full of promise, but also heartache and myriad new challenges. Moving, suspenseful, and unexpectedly funny, What Is the What is an astonishing novel that…
This is among the most exquisitely rendered memoirs I have ever read. It recounts Aciman’s boyhood in the cosmopolitan world of Alexandria, Egypt, in the 1950s, just before the ethnic nationalism of Egypt’s leader, Gamal Abdal Nassar, swept this world away. Every sentence exudes tender nostalgia for a vanished milieu. It is, profoundly, an exile’s book, mourning and celebrating a life that has been lost.
This richly coloured memoir chronicles the exploits of a flamboyant Jewish family, from its bold arrival in cosmopolitan Alexandria to its defeated exodus three generations later. In elegant and witty prose, Andre Aciman introduces us to the marvellous eccentrics who shaped his life: the strutting daredevil, soldier, salesman, and spy; the two grandmothers, the Princess and the Saint, who gossip in six languages; and Aunt Flora, the German refugee who warns that Jews lose everything "at least twice in their lives." And through it all, we come to know a boy who, even as he longs for a wider world,…
The narrator of this novel is a North Vietnamese spy embedded in a South Vietnamese refugee community in California. Full of treachery, duplicity, and betrayal, it is also hilariously funny. More than any other novel I’ve read, it captures the milieu of exile perfectly. Waiters, taxi drivers, and corner-store owners plotting murder in California and counter-revolution back home; wars from across the ocean fought all over again on the streets of Los Angeles. Every modern tale of exile resonates in this novel.
It is April 1975, and Saigon is in chaos. At his villa, a general of the South Vietnamese army is drinking whiskey and, with the help of his trusted captain, drawing up a list of those who will be given passage aboard the last flights out of the country. The general and his compatriots start a new life in Los Angeles, unaware that one among their number, the captain, is secretly observing and reporting on the group to a higher-up in the Viet Cong. The Sympathizer is the story of this captain:…
Geeldoon is a Somali refugee who told the story of his extraordinary odyssey to Europe to an oral historian. It is a tale rendered without artifice, without an eye for style or craft. The sheer calamity of his experience spills from his mouth. You can tell from the tone of the narrative how urgent, how necessary it was for him to bear witness to his journey, perhaps if only to prove to himself that it really happened.
In 2015, an estimated 154,000 migrants entered Europe via the Mediterranean from Libya—an increase of more than 1,000 per cent from 2012, while Somalis, most of them young men, were among the top five nationalities crossing the Mediterranean during the first six months of 2015. Although much has been written about the rise in migration to Europe and migrant deaths at sea, little is written about the journey migrants take prior to attempting the crossing. We Kissed the Ground is a first-hand account of a young man’s attempt to migrate to Europe from Somaliland and the hardships of the journey…
This book tells the story of a young Somali man, Asad Abdullahi. Separated from his family at the age of seven at the onset of civil war, he spent his childhood roaming the streets of East Africa.
Aged 19, Asad put $1,200 in his pocket and headed down the length of the African continent to Johannesburg to make his fortune. So began an adventure in a country richer and more violent than he could have imagined. A Man of Good Hope is the story of a person shorn of the things we have come to believe make us human – personal possessions, parents, siblings. And yet Asad is an intensely human life, one suffused with desires and a need to leave something of permanence on this earth.
Edge of the Known World is a near-future love and adventure story about a brilliant young refugee caught in era when genetic screening tests like 23AndMe make it impossible to hide a secret identity. The novel is distributed by Simon & Schuster. It is a USA Today Bestseller and 2024 American Fiction Awards Winner in multiple categories, including Best New Fiction, Political Thriller, and Science Fiction: General.
Alexandra is a gifted student, adoring daughter, and exuberant prankster. She is also hiding in the open. After a blissful childhood, Alex learned she’s an illegal refugee from a brutal regime, smuggled into…
Fans of Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake will be swept away by this riveting speculative fiction adventure and love story about family, genetic privacy, and the onrushing future of surveillance technology.
2024 American Fiction Awards Winner in multiple categories, including Best New Fiction, Political Thriller, and Science Fiction
Alexandra Tashen is a brilliant student, adoring daughter, merry wit, and exuberant prankster. After a blissful childhood on a Texas ranch, she learns the truth: She is a refusé, an illegal refugee smuggled into the Allied Nations as an infant. Everyone from her birth region carries a harmless but detectable bit of…
