Readings

From Omar El Akkad, the widely acclaimed author of American War, comes What Strange Paradise (Knopf), a beautifully written, unrelentingly dramatic, and profoundly moving new 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 overfilled, 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 has 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…