What Strange Paradise

by Omar El Akkad

£14.99

Reserve a copy

×

Reserve a copy

Reserve a copy of What Strange Paradise for collection at the Marlow Bookshop. If you provide your email address below, we will contact you when this item is ready for collection. For delivery by post add the address to the order notes and we will be in touch to arrange payment.


    Fiction

    Hardback

    9781529069471

    Published August 2021

    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 boat; 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.

    The Year of the Locust by Terry Hayes | 9780593064962

    The Year of the Locust

    Terry Hayes

    £22.00

    Mistletoe Malice by Kathleen Farrell | 9780571378265

    Mistletoe Malice

    Kathleen Farrell

    £9.99

    Lord Jim at Home by Dinah Brooke | 9781914198663

    Lord Jim at Home

    Dinah Brooke

    £9.99

    Night Side of the River Ghost Stories by Jeanette Winterson | 9781787334175

    Night Side of the River Ghost Stories

    Jeanette Winterson

    £18.99

    Before We Say Goodbye by Toshikazu Kawaguchi | 9781035023424

    Before We Say Goodbye

    Toshikazu Kawaguchi

    £14.99

    Light Over Liskeard by Louis de Bernieres | 9781787303997

    Light Over Liskeard

    Louis de Bernieres

    £20.00