Top 5 essential non-fiction books about refugees
By Rute Costa
This is the WorldLabs Top 5 Refugee non-fiction books, showcasing the inspiring real-life stories of humans in a time of crisis.
1. Cast Away by Charlotte McDonald-Gibson (2016)
Cast Away tells five different stories of survival from Europe’s Refugee Crisis. Charlotte McDonald-Gibson is brilliant in her moving and personalised accounts of these voyagers’ unbelievable journeys: she offers readers a glimpse beyond the politicised, mediatised crisis, into the hopes, dreams, challenges and walls that drive and haunt refugees. Cast Away is the compelling product of years of relentless reporting on Europe’s refugee crisis, and a necessary reminder of the humanity that lies beneath it all.
2. The New Odyssey by Patrick Kingsley (2016)
In The New Odyssey, Patrick Kingsley follows the trail of Syrian refugees, from the moment home is ripped from them, to when they reach safer – not necessarily homier – grounds. Across seventeen countries, Kingsley encounters voyagers, smugglers, coastguards, volunteers, hoteliers and border guards, and tries to put the pieces of countless chaotic journeys together. The Guardian’s migration correspondent’s unparalleled account gives an honest and necessary portrayal of the humans behind the faceless European migration crisis.
3. City of Thorns by Ben Rawlence (2016)
Ben Rawlence is a former Human Rights Watch researcher who spent five years documenting the lives inside Dadaab, the world’s largest refugee camp, in North-East Kenya. City of Thorns is the result of an up-close exploration of the dehumanising living conditions refugees face in the camp. It tells nine moving stories of extraordinary individuals whose lives were shaken to the core by the Somali civil-war and religious extremism. Rawlence succeeds at exposing the humanity of every single person he encounters in this book, reminding readers that the migration crisis is not just political – it is mostly human.
4. Goodbye Sarajevo by Atka Reid and Hana Schofield (2011)
Goodbye Sarajevo is the compelling real story of a family separated by the Bosnian War. It is told through the voices of two sisters: Hana, the youngest, who was put on a UN bus and driven to resettle as a child refugee in Croatia, and Atka, ten years older, who was forced to stay behind in war-torn, sieged Sarajevo, to look after the rest of the family. Amidst memories of the most violent conflict in Europe since the Second World War, the sisters tell us their story of suffering and hope, distance and re-encounters and, above all, human kindness.
5. They Poured Fire on Us from the Sky by Alephonsion Deng, Benson Deng, and Benjamin Ajak; with Judy A. Bernstein (2005)
They Poured Fire on Us from the Sky is a memoir told by three of the Lost Boys of Sudan. Alepho, Benson and Benjamin were amongst the over 40,000 children of the Nuer and Dinka tribes who were orphaned during the Second Sudanese Civil War, and embarked on a long journey to refugee camps in neighbouring Ethiopia and Kenya. Through the heat of the desert, and thousands-of-miles-long hunger, tiredness and thirst, they faced inexplicable dangers only to arrive to refugee camps that offered little relief. This is an extraordinary account of the strength of children, and their unrelenting hope in the face of brutality.
Cover photo credit: Benjamin Western