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'what strange paradise' focuses on the human stories at the heart of a crisis.

Gabino Iglesias

Omar El Akkad's knows about the cultural, historical, and political forces that drive countless people to migrate illegally, but in What Strange Paradise , he leaves those things aside and focuses instead on telling the stories of the people at the core of the migrant crisis. This book is hard to read because it brings to the page the fear, suffering, language barriers, injustices, and risk of death that come with leaving home for some other hostile place, but it's also a pleasure to read, because hope and kindness light the story in unexpected ways.

The Calypso, a small old fishing boat, overloaded with people, has sunk. The bodies of those onboard have been lost at sea, or litter the beach of an unnamed island struggling to cope with the throngs of undocumented migrants who reach its shores with increasing frequency. The only survivor is a nine-year-old Syrian boy named Amir. Amir wakes up on the beach scared and alone, his face down in the sand, and runs away from the men who approach him yelling in a language he's never heard before. Luckily for Amir, he runs into Vänna — a local teenage girl who lives with her stern parents. She helps Amir to hide, feeds him, and eventually takes him to a local refugee camp. But conditions in the camp are terrible, so the woman who runs the place opts to send Amir to see someone on the other end of the island who might be able to get him back home on another boat. Vänna, despite being so young, becomes Amir's guardian and guide in this perilous journey.

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Told in alternating chapters that chronicle Amir and his family's life until — and during — the disastrous trip, and everything that happens to him after reaching the shores of the island, What Strange Paradise is the story of two children pushed together by a random encounter, and the ways they manage overcome fear and the language barrier that separates them.

El Akkad's precise prose allows him to inject heartfelt observations throughout the novel. For example, Amir always keeps in mind his father's saying that people persist through poverty and war, because "What else is there to do?" He also considers "aspirational Westernness," the idea that the West is the ultimate goal, which allows him to put the thoughts of non-Westerners at the center of the story. In What Strange Paradise , Eritreans, Egyptians, Syrians, Palestinians, Ethiopians, and Lebanese people all share a dream: To escape their lives and find a better place to live, a nicer future for their children, and an existence away from poverty and the chaos of war and political persecution.

This dream pushes them forward and permeates every aspect of their lives. It also makes them do illegal things like procuring false documentation and paying a lot of money to human traffickers in order to reach new shores. In other cases, migrating is something they think about constantly but don't actively pursue. For Amir's mother, for example, watching bland soap operas is like going to school:

He knew the reason his mother watched these shows had nothing to do with the storylines. Instead she focused on mouthing and reciting the actors' words, bending and flattening the vowels just so. And he knew the accents of the actors sounded common and vulgar to her, but if she ever hoped to avoid the immigrants' markup, every last trace of home in her voice had to be wiped clean. She needed to sound like the place in which she hoped to restart her life.

While Amir is the main character, Vänna shares the spotlight, emerging as a hero who embodies the best humanity has to offer, even as her stern home life leaves her feeling homeless and abandoned. And she's not the only compelling side character — there are people who show up only occasionally, yet become powerful ghosts who haunt the narrative until the last page. For example, there is a pregnant woman named Umm Ibrahim on the boat. Umm forms a bond with Amir, and the fact that she's pregnant and that her state is what pushes her to migrate under dangerous conditions make her special. Umm has a plea in English she's memorized, and she repeats it time and again during the trip: "Hello. I am pregnant. I will have a baby on April twenty-eight. I need hospital and doctor to have safe baby. Please help." Amir makes it, and our hearts rejoice at that, but the ghosts of Umm and her unborn child keep whispering her plea — a plea that's painfully real — to us, long after we've turned the last page.

What Strange Paradise is a book of extreme opposites. On one side there are men from the island's military forces looking for Amir, and on the other there is Vänna, who will do whatever it takes to get a strange boy she just met, and with whom she can't communicate, to safety. And the opposites don't stop there; 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. While this constant contrast is interesting, perhaps El Akkad's biggest accomplishment with What Strange Paradise is that it manages to push past political talking points and shocking statistics to rehumanize the discussion about migration on a global scale, and it does so with enough heart to be memorable.

Gabino Iglesias is an author, book reviewer and professor living in Austin, Texas. Find him on Twitter at @Gabino_Iglesias .

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WHAT STRANGE PARADISE

by Omar El Akkad ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 20, 2021

A compassionate snapshot of one Syrian refugee's struggle to plot a course for home.

A migrant boy finds an unexpected ally in his accidental voyage across the sea.

In recent years, images of discarded life jackets piling up on the shores of Greek islands have shocked the world, as migrants from the Middle East pursue uncertain futures in Europe or elsewhere in the fabled "West." In this timely, captivating novel, El Akkad dramatizes the story of one such traveler: Amir Utu, a 9-year-old boy who unwittingly undertakes the turbulent journey. After accidentally boarding a repurposed fishing boat heading north from Alexandria, Amir must contend with punishing seas, unpredictable weather, exhausting hunger, and an eventual storm that leads to the overcrowded ship's capsizing. In chapters that alternate between Amir's harrowing, multiday voyage and his fortunate encounter with Vänna, a teenage islander, upon washing ashore, El Akkad pieces together the strands of Amir's story, past and present, as they lead up to and diverge from that fateful moment at sea. El Akkad's compelling, poetic prose captures the precarity and desperation of people pushed to the brink, and the wide-ranging dialogue levels frequently trenchant critiques (Americans are "comfortable with violence, not sex. Sometimes they just get the two confused") even as it produces a few admittedly didactic monologues (a smuggler lectures the migrants: "You are the temporary object of their fraudulent outrage"). This is an equally incisive, if more conventional, novel than the author's debut, American War (2017).

Pub Date: July 20, 2021

ISBN: 978-0-525-65790-3

Page Count: 256

Publisher: Knopf

Review Posted Online: May 18, 2021

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2021

LITERARY FICTION | FAMILY LIFE & FRIENDSHIP

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New York Times Bestseller

by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 6, 2024

A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.

A young woman’s experience as a nurse in Vietnam casts a deep shadow over her life.

When we learn that the farewell party in the opening scene is for Frances “Frankie” McGrath’s older brother—“a golden boy, a wild child who could make the hardest heart soften”—who is leaving to serve in Vietnam in 1966, we feel pretty certain that poor Finley McGrath is marked for death. Still, it’s a surprise when the fateful doorbell rings less than 20 pages later. His death inspires his sister to enlist as an Army nurse, and this turn of events is just the beginning of a roller coaster of a plot that’s impressive and engrossing if at times a bit formulaic. Hannah renders the experiences of the young women who served in Vietnam in all-encompassing detail. The first half of the book, set in gore-drenched hospital wards, mildewed dorm rooms, and boozy officers’ clubs, is an exciting read, tracking the transformation of virginal, uptight Frankie into a crack surgical nurse and woman of the world. Her tensely platonic romance with a married surgeon ends when his broken, unbreathing body is airlifted out by helicopter; she throws her pent-up passion into a wild affair with a soldier who happens to be her dead brother’s best friend. In the second part of the book, after the war, Frankie seems to experience every possible bad break. A drawback of the story is that none of the secondary characters in her life are fully three-dimensional: Her dismissive, chauvinistic father and tight-lipped, pill-popping mother, her fellow nurses, and her various love interests are more plot devices than people. You’ll wish you could have gone to Vegas and placed a bet on the ending—while it’s against all the odds, you’ll see it coming from a mile away.

Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2024

ISBN: 9781250178633

Page Count: 480

Publisher: St. Martin's

Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2023

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2023

FAMILY LIFE & FRIENDSHIP | GENERAL FICTION | HISTORICAL FICTION

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THE LIFE IMPOSSIBLE

by Matt Haig ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 3, 2024

Haig’s positive message will keep his fans happy.

A British widow travels to Ibiza and learns that it’s never too late to have a happy life.

In a world that seems to be getting more unstable by the moment, Haig’s novels are a steady ship in rough seas, offering a much-needed positive message. In works like the bestselling The Midnight Library (2020), he reminds us that finding out what you truly love and where you belong in the universe are the foundations of building a better existence. His latest book continues this upbeat messaging, albeit in a somewhat repetitive and facile way. Retired British schoolteacher Grace Winters discovers that an old acquaintance has died and left her a ramshackle home in Ibiza. A widow who lost her only child years earlier, Grace is at first reluctant to visit the house, because, at 72, she more or less believes her chance for happiness is over—but when she rouses herself to travel to the island, she discovers the opposite is true. A mystery surrounds her friend’s death involving a roguish islander, his activist daughter, an internationally famous DJ, and a strange glow in the sea that acts as a powerful life force and upends Grace’s ideas of how the cosmos works. Framed as a response to a former student’s email, the narrative follows Grace’s journey from skeptic (she was a math teacher, after all) to believer in the possibility of magic as she learns to move on from the past. Her transformation is the book’s main conflict, aside from a protest against an evil developer intent on destroying Ibiza’s natural beauty. The outcome is never in doubt, and though the story often feels stretched to the limit—this novel could have easily been a novella—the author’s insistence on the power of connection to change lives comes through loud and clear.

Pub Date: Sept. 3, 2024

ISBN: 9780593489277

Page Count: 368

Publisher: Viking

Review Posted Online: Aug. 3, 2024

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2024

LITERARY FICTION | GENERAL FICTION

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Book Review: What Strange Paradise by Omar El Akkad

Six years ago, the world was shocked by the widely circulated photo of Alan Kurdi’s lifeless body sprawled across the sand at a picturesque Turkish beach. The image was inescapable across the internet, eliciting a powerful social response. As time has passed, though, international media has moved on from the refugee crisis in the Middle East–what at first dominated headlines and charity fundraisers has slowly faded into the background, at least in the United States. 

In What Strange Paradise, Omar El Akkad brings back the conversation by refocusing through the lens of one boy’s fictional story. He follows Amir, a nine year-old boy shipwrecked as he crosses the Mediterranean aboard a smuggler’s boat. It’s incredibly effective–the novel is fast-paced and engaging, while still taking time to discuss the politics and even philosophy of the crisis. As Amir’s story unfolds, it becomes both unique and universal; his lived experience is of course fictional and one-of-a-kind, but his broader situation and some of the dynamics in his life are much more universal, applicable to so many millions across the globe. 

Amir’s story is an allegory for those of many others like him: What Strange Paradise illustrates the loss of agency experienced by many refugees as they abandon their homes and families–in many cases, their futures are entirely up in the air, dependent on dumb luck alone. Amir, an unaccompanied young child on the run from government officials in a foreign country where he does not speak the language, faces this loss of agency to a profound degree. 

Rather than being able to create his own path, Amir is primarily a passive object to be acted upon by the events and individuals in the novel. He ends up crossing the Mediterranean in the first place simply by chance because a stranger told him to board a boat, leaving behind most of his family. He’s shipwrecked by a perfect storm of negligence and bad luck, and he washes ashore by pure luck. Even the characters who at the very least have his best interests at heart seem to hold very little regard for the preferences Amir may have regarding his own future–he’s shuttled across the island, the military hot on his heels, without so much as a question about how he wants to proceed. Throughout What Strange Paradise, outside forces wrestle for control over Amir’s fate, from the smugglers looking to traffic him to Colonel Kethros, who’d rather see him in handcuffs than let Amir or any other refugee “colonize” the island. From the moment Amir sets foot on the smugglers’ boat, his future is not his own to control.

Even the novel’s narrative structure alludes to this theme of predetermined fate–it’s told in two alternating sections, divided by the fatal shipwreck. Throughout the Before section, detailing Amir’s days afloat on the Calypso, the reader knows the boat’s tragic destiny. While the passengers scramble last-minute for rescue, the futility of their efforts is obvious; the story has a prescribed ending, and we understand its inevitability. Rather than taking away from the story, though, the lack of suspense does the opposite–it allows the narrative to take its time, letting the passengers tell us their thoughts and ideas and giving us space to process them.

In the moments on the Calypso between spurts of action and danger, El Akkad takes the opportunity to bring cultural discussion to the front and center. The passengers talk about the future beyond their Mediterranean destination: “Which America [are we going to]?” somebody asks. “There’s a lot of countries within that country.” Mohamed, an employee of the smugglers, brings back the realities of control with his reply: “The America that gets to decide what to do with people like us.” 

Throughout the journey, Mohamed continues to comment on the role of power in the West. “The two types of people in this world aren’t good, and bad–they’re engines and fuel,” he says. “You will always, always be fuel.” These brief passages were some of the best in the novel; they were pointed observations and universal truths, woven seamlessly into the fast-paced narrative. 

The novel’s very last scene mirrors its very first–a boy, laying on the beach as the hustle and bustle of a wealthy, self-absorbed world goes on around him. The ending is different, though; this boy never wakes up. It’s not clear how to interpret this scene, or even if it’s up to interpretation at all–are we seeing Amir, unable to escape his original waterlogged fate no matter how far he runs, or are we seeing another boy, a parallel story? Maybe it’s Alan Kurdi, or maybe it’s an alternate reality where Amir never makes it out of the sea alive in the first place. Ultimately, though, it doesn’t matter. The brief image on the last page of What Strange Paradise could depict any little boy who made a treacherous journey like Amir’s–that’s the point.

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Omar el akkad talks about “what strange paradise,” and sheera frenkel and cecilia kang talk about facebook and “an ugly truth.”.

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Omar El Akkad’s new novel, “What Strange Paradise,” uses some fablelike techniques to comment on the migrant crisis caused by war in the Middle East. El Akkad explains that he thinks of the novel as a reinterpretation of the story of Peter Pan, told as the story of a contemporary child refugee.

“There’s this thing Borges once said about how all literature is tricks, and no matter how clever your tricks are, they eventually get discovered,” El Akkad says. “My tricks are not particularly clever. I lean very hard on inversion. I wanted to take a comforting story that Westerners have been telling their kids for the last hundred years, and I wanted to invert it, to tell a different kind of story.” He continues: “At its core, it’s a book about dueling fantasies: the fantasies of people who want to come to the West because they think it’s a cure for all ills, and the fantasies of people who exist in the West and think of those people as barbarians at the gate. The book takes place at the collision of those two fantasies.”

Sheera Frenkel and Cecilia Kang, two reporters at The Times, visit the podcast this week to discuss their new book, “An Ugly Truth: Inside Facebook’s Battle for Domination,” including how the company makes many of its strategic decisions.

“A lot of people think that a company like this, that’s so sophisticated, that has so many people who have come in with such incredible pedigrees, that they have a plan in mind,” Kang says. “They’re actually, in many cases, doing this on the fly. They’re making a lot of ad hoc decisions.”

Also on this week’s episode, Tina Jordan looks back at Book Review history as it celebrates its 125th anniversary; Alexandra Alter has news from the publishing world; and Emily Eakin and MJ Franklin talk about what they’ve been reading. Pamela Paul is the host.

Here are the books discussed in this week’s “What We’re Reading”:

“How the Word Is Passed” by Clint Smith

“Red Comet” by Heather Clark

“Lenin” by Victor Sebestyen

We would love to hear your thoughts about this episode, and about the Book Review’s podcast in general. You can send them to [email protected] .

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Omar El Akkad on the 'casual cruelty' that inspired his novel What Strange Paradise

Tareq hadhad will defend what strange paradise by omar el akkad on canada reads 2022.

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Like a lot of writers, Omar El Akkad has a habit of archiving bits of conversation for future use. It has served him well: both of his novels,  American War   and  What Strange Paradise ,  were selected for  Canada Reads . 

The most recent of the two,  What Strange Paradise ,  also won the 2021 Scotiabank Giller Prize .

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In chapters that alternate between before and after a shipwreck,  What Strange Paradise   follows a 9 year-old Syrian boy and his unexpected journey to hostile shores. The opening scene finds Amir unconscious on a foreign beach, surrounded by death and debris. When Amir wakes up, he sees soldiers and instinctively makes a run for it.

Tareq Hadhad , CEO of Peace by Chocolate and former refugee, will defend  What Strange Paradise   on  Canada Reads   2022. Hosted by Ali Hassan, the debates take place March 28-31.

Omar El Akkad sat down with CBC Books to talk about the novel, the conversations that inspired it and his second Canada Reads .

How are you feeling about being on Canada Reads again?

I'm equal parts deeply grateful and deeply anxious. My very limited experience with  Canada Reads for my one previous rodeo is that you're subjected to this kind of very communal form of feedback that exists not only in the panellists's conversations, but also the folks that pop up on Twitter and take this very seriously. It's kind of a mechanism of attention and spotlight that I'm not used to at all. 

I'm deeply grateful to be in this kind of company and deeply anxious about how this thing's going to play out. 

Is there anything you'd like to say to Twitter this year, something to keep in mind as they watch the show?

Feel free to yell at me as much as you like. I have no issues with that whatsoever. This thing gets pretty intense sometimes, but the fact that people are passionate enough to get intense about books offsets any of the mentions that show up in my Twitter notifications. The fact that people are passionate about this is really heartening. 

And, the fact that our public broadcaster dedicates a week of programming to have people talk about books — that's such a miraculous and rare thing. I talk a lot about this notion of how anxious this makes me, but that's just because I'm a naturally anxious person. This whole thing is so unique and it's just an incredible privilege. For all of my insecurities about having celebrities talk about my book in public, I'm a huge fan of the whole endeavour.

How was meeting your champion, Tareq Hadhad ?

It was incredibly humbling. This person has taken time out of his life to enter into a very public setting to talk about my book. It's difficult to say how grateful I am to him for taking this on, for choosing my book.

And, he's had this incredible life. He's had a series of experiences that would be enough to break most people, and it was just a pleasure to talk to him.

If the book does well on the other end of Canada Reads , it will be entirely his doing. And if it doesn't, it will be entirely the fault of my own book.

I just hope he enjoys the experience because it's really unlike anything else.

What is the paradise of What Strange Paradise ? 

I suppose I think of it as delusions. The paradise in What Strange Paradise   is a delusion of safety, a delusion of home, a delusion of what it means to have arrived. 

The book takes place at the collision of two duelling fantasies. There's one pointed toward the part of the world I was raised in, which says the people coming over here are barbarians at the gate, we need to do anything we can to stop them. And then, there's the fantasy pointed at the other direction that says, if I can just make it to the West, everything will be OK. 

Most of the book takes place at the collision point of these two fantasies where their power and their influence is such that it renders reality subservient. What the world is really like becomes secondary to what these various characters believe the world to be. 

So that, for me, is the paradise in  What Strange Paradise — it's the delusion of what the world is, instead of what it actually is.

One of the things that struck me was how empathy is such a finite resource on the island and on the boat. Do we have a delusion of humanity that our empathy is infinite?

I think one of the reasons that empathy gets a bad rap a lot of the time in this part of the world is because the concept itself is so closely tied to Western threads of individualism. This notion that understanding other people's experience is important, and if I understand it hard enough, I will make everything better. This notion of individual agency and individualism that runs through so much of the society we've created here, I think tends to muddy up what empathy can be.

• Omar El Akkad's best writing advice? Spend a lot of time deep in thought

But we also live in a time where I genuinely could not tell you what I was outraged about this time two years ago, or three years ago. We went through this period of cascading scandals and outrages and indignities. I think, almost as a psychological self-defence mechanism, a lot of us put up this wall whereby we could only be empathetic for a certain amount of time, relative to a certain situation, and then, it was time to move on and be empathetic about something else.

I think the book, in particular, is an attempt to do the opposite. This novel is an attempt to dwell. Just sit with this. Just sit with this experience and its consequences, as opposed to becoming sufficiently outraged about a particular injustice one day and then moving on to the next one the next day.

I think empathy is vital, I don't know that empathy is enough. I don't think empathy on an individual level does very much to offset injustice at an institutional level. I think that's one of the delusions addressed in the book — individually, by being good enough, we can't offset institutional injustice.

Do you remember what the catalyst for writing this book was?  

The closest thing I have to a genesis moment was in 2012. I was still working with the Globe and Mail as a journalist and I had flown down to Egypt, where I was born, to cover the aftermath of the Arab Spring. I was driving around with an old high school buddy who was complaining about rent.

At one point I asked him, "What's the price for an apartment in your building?" And he said, "Well, do you mean the local's price or the Syrian's price?"

I said, "What the hell's the Syrian price?" He said, "Well, we've had these people come into the country recently, and you can charge them three times as much. They don't have any choice. What are they going to do? Go somewhere else?"

The casualness of that cruelty I think was the instigating moment where I started to think about the things that would congeal into this narrative and thematic arc of  What Strange Paradise . 

I don't steal in whole characters, but I do steal in slivers of people. - Omar El Akkad

This came in the context of all of these Arab leaders in the country of my birth, the countries I grew up in, talking about how we have to help our Syrian brothers and sisters. And, it was all rhetorical posturing that had nothing to do with what was happening on the ground. 

On the ground, there was a population that was fit to be exploited, and so they were going to be exploited because that's how we've set up our society. I had seen this over the years — the rhetoric of this kind of unity that a lot of the time doesn't exist. It's a fantasy. It's a fabrication.

Is that part of what inspired some of the scenes on the boat?

Yeah, absolutely, a lot of the things that happen on the boat are based on slivers of conversation and characteristics of the people I grew up around. I don't steal in whole characters, but I do steal in slivers of people. A lot of that stuff works its way onto the boat.

These are conversations that represent certain kinds of mindsets. Anyone who grew up in the Arab world will recognize some of these positions, we've all heard them. Not even just on the boat, but for example, early on in the story there is a scene where Amir's family has moved into their rich relative's house for a while. And this relative is basically trying to explain to Amir's mother that the things that happened to her didn't really happen, that her house wasn't really bombed. She says something like, "Oh no, they just make all that stuff up on a sound-stage somewhere in Qatar." 

I've heard that conversation. I've heard people say that, and it's the most infuriating thing when someone has the privilege of essentially ignoring reality without any consequence. A lot of these things work their way into the story. In some cases there's verbatim dialogue of conversations I've heard growing up, and in other cases, it's slivers of the kind of people that shaped my view of the world for a very long time.

It sounds like you've always been paying attention.

I do archive things for future use in a very insidious kind of way, so this stuff spills out years, sometimes decades later.

I heard in a couple of interviews that you talked about being surprised by some of the reader reaction to your debut novel,  American War . Have you had any similar experiences with this book?

Weirdly enough, it was worse with What Strange Paradise .  I thought the opposite would be true because American War   is a kitchen sink book — there's a lot going on in there. It's sprawling. There's world-building. It's set in America, which already guarantees that you'll have a million different opinions of what's going on in the book.

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I thought the thing I was doing in  What Strange Paradise was relatively straightforward. And then, the first four people who read the manuscript — it was about the fifth draft, I think, when I started showing it to people — had four entirely different interpretations of what was going on in this book. I wasn't ready for that at all. 

It's hard to talk about the specific interpretations without spoiling the book, but I will tell you that in the time since the novel came out, I've gotten emails, notes, DMs and tweets from readers who, not only have had an entire spectrum of opinions about what was happening in this book, but many of them, once I started thinking about them, felt so much more profound that what I had in mind, which is a really weird place to be as an author. I wasn't ready for any of that because I thought it was a very straightforward narrative trick that I was trying to pull.

How does that make you feel?

It used to be really frustrating. When American War first came out, I remember an indie bookseller in Texas wrote a note about it, saying " American War shows why a second Civil War would be brutal and bloody, and why it is necessary." I thought, "Really? This isn't a pro-war book." When I was younger, it really upset me.

Even now, a few days ago someone was posting on Twitter what an awful book  American War   is because it's such a pro-Trump book. Their theory was that, in the book, Mississippi, Alabama and Georgia formed the basis of the new Confederacy. I'm not going to reach out to every person on Twitter and say, "Hey, I wrote this book before Trump ran for president." You can't do that.

The older I get, the more comfort I take in the fact that these books are going to outlive me, even if they are just collecting dust on a library shelf out there. If they're going to outlive me, I take great comfort that they are going to live as many different lives as possible. It used to be very frustrating and now it's one of my favourite things.

Was there a difference for you when you were writing about the boat versus when you were writing about the island?

Yes, there was. This book went through eight drafts. For the first half of those, there was no "before and after" structure. There was a chronological narrative, running from the start of the opening chapter through the island chapters. I was hitting so many points where I knew the narrative couldn't continue without telling the reader something about the backstory. I would go into these long and jarring off-shoots into backstory, and I didn't like how it was flowing. 

I write these sort of giant plotting documents. When I was putting this together, I realized the book steals from a lot of places, such as The Odyssey,   Paradise Lost  and Peter Pan . But I realized it was also stealing a lot from Biblical structure, the Old Testament and New Testament. I thought, "What if you try to codify this? What if you make it a formal structural element?" And then, everything sort of fell into place because suddenly I had a very Old Testament set of chapters and a New Testament set of chapters.

I had a set of chapters that were concerned with an exodus from Egypt, and a set of chapters that were concerned with a miraculous rebirth. Once I did that, I got rid of some of the narrative pacing issues. But then, I had to figure out a bunch of technical stuff because you can't have alternating "before" and "after" chapters and then have 15 "after" chapters and 7 "before" chapters. It just doesn't work, right? I had to figure out a way for them to converge.

The work in the later drafts was making sure they converged in a way that makes sense. But once "before and after" came into place, it was a real watershed moment for the book.

What is your definition of success, as a writer?

When I was younger, I thought of it in terms of the impact that the books would have, and how they would change people's minds.

The older I get, the more I realize that I'm only really, truly happy when I've written. Not when I am writing, because that's when all my insecurities come forward. But there's this famous quote, John Cage wasn't the first to say it, but he was one of them, "When the painter goes into the studio, everyone they know walks in with them — their critics, their audience, their relatives, their friends, their enemies. As they start to do the work, one by one, these people begin to walk out of the room. And then, if you're very lucky, even you walk out of the room."

The older I get, the more I realize that I'm only really, truly happy when I've written. - Omar El Akkad

I think for me, I don't know about success, but happiness as a writer is when you step away from the page, and you realize that in that moment, that even you walked out of the room. Something was happening that was outside your control. Something serendipitous. Something honest. Whenever I have those fleeting moments, and I literally had that moment once writing  What Strange Paradise ,  where I stopped writing and a few minutes later I thought, "Oh, I was in the place. I don't know how to get to the place, I can't figure it out, I can't recreate it, but I was in the place. That, to me, is the lasting success of writing. 

I've seen a lot of the spectrum of overt success. I've done bookstore events where literally three people showed up, and one of them was there by accident and was too embarrassed to get up and leave. Obviously, I've recently had some success with awards. All of that is important, it's important to experience all of that, but when I think about success, it's really when the world walks away from you and you just put something down on paper. That's what I'll be chasing after for the rest of my career I think.

Did it feel natural to go from writing, as you mentioned, a "kitchen sink book" when there was a lot of action to a "quieter" novel that you dwell inside a bit more? 

It felt natural for me, but it was also scary as hell. American War   was a bit of an odd book in the sense that, by my standards, it was incredibly successful because I didn't think it would get published in the first place. The fact that it did, and that it didn't cost the publisher money, all of that for me meant that it was a raging success. 

But it also didn't sell millions of copies. It wasn't successful in any absolute sense. I was in this odd spot where I was this novelist with one book under my belt. It had done well, but not so well that I could get away with anything. And the natural business-savvy decision would have been to write something very similar to American War . 

• 'We can't afford not to be hopeful': Omar El Akkad talks about writing his novel What Strange Paradise

Whatever readership I built up through speculative fiction, the savvy thing to do would be to capitalize on that and instead I went in this very different direction. You could almost put a sticker on What Strange Paradise  that said, "If you loved  American War ,  you're going to hate this thing." I was scared, I was really scared. But it was one of those things where I felt this was the book I needed to write so I sat down and wrote it, and I thought it wouldn't be published. A lot of the foreign publishers had no interest in it. To them, it was the story about something that maybe would've been relevant six or seven years ago. But for them, the moment had passed. The migration across the Mediterranean was old news. 

For a while, I thought the book would wreck my career. I didn't think it would go out into the world. I was terrified.

How do you cope with the fear and anxiety of being a writer?

I'm fortunate that I'm not important or popular enough to have to worry about my individual writing decisions having massive repercussions beyond my own career. I don't sell millions of copies. I have these moments where it feels like I'm never going to write a decent sentence again and I've come up with a few tricks to try and side-step those insecurities, one if which is to acknowledge that however talented or untalented I may be, this is the only thing I know how to do. I can't do much else, but I can write. It's one of the few things in my life that I come back to, even when it kicks my ass.

I tried taking up guitar lessons a few years back. It was difficult. I quit immediately. The fact that I keep coming back to this place, no matter how difficult the actual process is, leads me to believe this is what I should be doing with my life. 

That's not enough of a justification to keep inflicting these books on the general readership, but it is enough of a justification to keep writing and that's all I need day-to-day to deal with the anxieties and insecurities of being involved in this kind of work.

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Related Stories

• My Life in Books 7 books that Canada Reads panellist Tareq Hadhad loved reading
• Tareq Hadhad says Omar El Akkad's Canada Reads novel What Strange Paradise echoes his own lived experience
• Q&A 'The collision point of two fantasies': Omar El Akkad and Tareq Hadhad discuss What Strange Paradise

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BOOK REVIEW: “What Strange Paradise” by Omar El Akkad is “Unforgettable”

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Hope and kindness are also prevalent throughout the book. Umm Ibrahim looks after Amir as if he were her own son, and Madame El Ward breaks the rules to bring him to safety. However, the strongest reminder of hope and kindness lies in the bond between Vänna and Amir. Vänna watches her mother and others in the town dehumanize the migrants, and yet she never succumbs to the cynical attitudes of those around her. Instead, despite the language barrier that separates her and Amir, she immediately realizes she must get him to safety by whatever means necessary — no matter the consequences. Though the fate of Vänna and Amir remains ambiguous, their persistence and friendship serve as a reminder that “One should try to believe in things … even if they let you down afterward.”

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What Strange Paradise

59 pages • 1 hour read

A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapters 1-5

Chapters 6-11

Chapters 12-17

Chapters 18-23

Chapters 24-30

Character Analysis

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Discussion Questions

Summary and Study Guide

What Strange Paradise is a 2021 novel written by acclaimed writer Omar El Akkad, author of American War . The plot is split between “Before” chapters, depicting protagonist Amir’s life as a refugee fleeing Syria as well as his time aboard an ill-fated refugee boat, and “After” chapters, in which he meets the secondary protagonist, Vänna, and contends with the perils of a country hostile to immigrants. El Akkad’s novel sheds light on the motives of migrants and refugees, as well as the insecurities and violence that plague the countries that receive them. What Strange Paradise was a New York Times notable book of the year in addition to being rated as one of the best books of 2021 by the Washington Post , NPR , and Buzzfeed , among others. The novel won the 2021 Scotiabank Giller Prize and was a finalist for the 2022 Aspen Words Literary Prize and the Oregon Book Award.

Born in Cairo, Egypt, Omar El Akkad grew up in Doha, Qatar, moved to Canada, and currently lives in Portland, Oregon. As an award-winning journalist, he has reported on major conflicts across the world, including the US war in Afghanistan, the trials at Guantánamo Bay, the Arab Spring in Egypt, and Black Lives Matter in Ferguson, Missouri.

Content Warning: This guide contains references to distressing scenes (including multiple human deaths and the death of children), xenophobia, and post-traumatic stress disorder.

Plot Summary

Amir Utu is a nine-year-old Syrian boy who is forced to flee his hometown after it is leveled by bombings during the Syrian Civil War. Amir travels with his mother (Iman), his stepfather (his “Quiet Uncle” Younis), and his new half-brother. After taking refuge with a family to whom the fighting and devastation of the war is nothing but propaganda, Amir and his family cross into Egypt and begin to establish themselves in the port city of Alexandria.

Amir becomes suspicious of Quiet Uncle and follows him when he sneaks out of the apartment late one night. Quiet Uncle’s destination is a smuggler ship, the Calypso. An old man in charge of letting migrants onto the ship lets Amir follow his uncle onto the deck, telling him that the passengers are just going to the Greek island of Kos for vacation. Quiet Uncle spots Amir on board and is furious. However, he agrees to pay for Amir’s passage, and Amir takes a place below deck, with the poorer, mostly African refugees. There, Amir meets a cast of migrants seeking a better life in the West. The passengers are kept in line by Mohamed , an apprentice smuggler.

Trouble brews when the Calypso encounters a late-winter storm. The crew narrowly avoid a passing ship and eventually run out of fuel, buffeted by increasingly violent waves, within sight of Kos. Mohamed begins to lose control of the passengers; not even his pistol can quiet their panic. The Calypso sinks. Amir is presumably the only survivor. He washes up on the shore of a resort amid the wreckage of the ship and the bodies of his companions. Officials are already combing through the wreckage as crowds of curious onlookers and journalists gather and as police and soldiers attempt to cordon the area off. Amir regains consciousness and runs away.

Vänna Hermes , a 15-year-old Greek girl, is cleaning her yard when she hears a commotion. Amir emerges, terrified and frantic. Vänna makes the quick decision to hide Amir in the barn on her family’s property. She misdirects the soldiers who were chasing Amir. She then attempts to communicate with Amir, but the language barrier proves difficult. Amir lies that his name is “David Utu.” Vänna’s mother, Marianne, a bitter, xenophobic woman, sends her to get lunch from the Hotel Xenios, the resort where Amir washed up. Vänna attempts to communicate to Amir to remain hidden until she returns. Along the way to the hotel, she learns about the shipwreck and guesses that Amir is a survivor.

While Vänna is gone, a migrant couple wanders onto the Hermes’ property. Marianne confronts them, holding them at gunpoint until her friend Colonel Kethros arrives. Kethros and his soldiers are in charge of capturing any undocumented migrants on the island. He takes control of the situation, arresting the couple. When Vänna returns, she finds a backpack left behind by the migrant couple. Vänna confronts her mother about the backpack, and Marianne instructs her to take it to Madame El Ward, Vänna’s former French teacher who now runs the migrant detention center.

Vänna takes Amir with her to visit Madame El Ward. Amir is intimidated by the stark conditions of the camp, but Madame El Ward comforts him by speaking to him in his own language. Madame El Ward persuades Vänna that it will be better for Amir to be with his own people in a refugee community on the mainland; she instructs Vänna to take Amir to a lighthouse from which he can be smuggled off the island. Amir and Vänna leave Madame El Ward just as Colonel Kethros and his men arrive at the compound. Kethros interrogates Madame El Ward: He knows a child survived the shipwreck and escaped on the island. Madame El Ward lets slip that the survivor is a boy.

After stopping at the Hotel Xenios, where Vänna steals some new clothes for Amir, Vänna and Amir hide in a sea cave. Vänna earns Amir’s trust, and he tells her his real name. The next day, they continue north, a step ahead of Kethros and his soldiers. Amir and Vänna make it to the lighthouse after a grueling day of hiking in the heat. During the night, Vänna sees another migrant boat come ashore.

The colonel and his men find signs of Amir and Vänna’s stay in the sea cave. After hearing of the new migrant ship, Kethros and the other soldiers head to the lighthouse, where he happens to see Vänna and Amir fleeing. Kethros pursues them with his soldiers. The children run into the woods. One of the soldiers lets them escape to the house where they can await the ferryman, but Kethros guesses what is happening and goes after them. Kethros corners Vänna and Amir, and the soldiers take Vänna away in their jeep. However, they are halted at a bridge at the island’s narrowest point by a shepherd and his flock. Vänna takes advantage of the confusion to escape and leaps off the bridge.

Amir, meanwhile, is interrogated by Kethros, who tells Amir that the world only pretends to care about him and the plight of other refugees; he, unlike the rest of the world, does not forget. He tells Amir that he will take him to the refugee camp for processing. Vänna suddenly reappears and smashes Kethros over the skull with a shovel, knocking him unconscious. The two children flee to the ferryman, who begrudgingly takes both aboard. They sail away from the island.

In the final chapter, El Akkad returns to the morning of the wreck of the Calypso . A man in a protective suit finds the dead body of a boy. Inspecting it, he finds the boy wearing a bell-shaped locket, indicating that it is Amir.

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What Strange Paradise: A novel Paperback – June 7, 2022

• Print length 256 pages
• Language English
• Publisher Vintage
• Publication date June 7, 2022
• Dimensions 5.12 x 0.72 x 8 inches
• ISBN-10 1984899244
• ISBN-13 978-1984899248
• See all details

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Editorial Reviews

About the author, excerpt. © reprinted by permission. all rights reserved., product details.

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Vintage (June 7, 2022)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Paperback ‏ : ‎ 256 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1984899244
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1984899248
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 9 ounces
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.12 x 0.72 x 8 inches
• #357 in Political Fiction (Books)
• #1,828 in Coming of Age Fiction (Books)
• #7,910 in Literary Fiction (Books)

About the author

Omar el akkad.

Omar El Akkad was born in Cairo, Egypt, and grew up in Doha, Qatar, before moving to Canada. He worked as a journalist at The Globe and Mail, and his coverage of a 2006 terror plot earned him a National Newspaper Award for Investigative Reporting. His other journalistic work includes dispatches from the NATO-led war in Afghanistan, the military trials at Guantánamo Bay, the Arab Spring revolution in Egypt, and the Black Lives Matter movement in Ferguson, Missouri. He has also received the Goff Penny Memorial Prize for Young Journalists, as well as three National Magazine Award honourable mentions. He is a graduate of Queen's University. He now lives with his wife in the woods just south of Portland, Oregon.

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