The Optician of Lampedusa

Author: Emma Jane Kirby
Publisher: OR Books
ISBN: 9781944869151
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Book Description
The only optician on the island of Lampedusa in the Mediterranean is an ordinary man in his fifties, who used to be indifferent to the fate of the thousands of refugees landing on the coast of the Italian island. One day in the fall of 2013, the unimaginable scale of the tragedy became clear to him, and it changed him forever: as he was out boating with some friends, he encountered hundreds of men, women and children drowning in the aftermath of a shipwreck. The Optician and his seven friends managed to save 47 people (his boat was designed to hold ten people). All the others died. This is a poignant and unforgettable account about the awakening of conscience: more than that, it brings home the reality of an ongoing refugee crisis that has resulted in one of the most massive migrations in human history. More than 360 people died in the disaster off the coast of Lampedusa on October 3, 2013. The original interview with Carmine Menna, the basis for this book, can be heard at http: //bit.ly/optlamp

The Optician of Lampedusa

Author: Emma Jane Kirby
Publisher: Penguin UK
ISBN: 0141985232
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 118

Book Description
From an award-winning BBC journalist, this moving book turns the testimony of an accidental hero into a timeless story about the awakening of human courage and conscience. 'I can hardly begin to describe to you what I saw as our boat approached the source of that terrible noise. I hardly want to. You won't understand because you weren't there. You can't understand. You see, I thought I'd heard seagulls screeching. Seagulls fighting over a lucky catch. Birds. Just birds.' Emma-Jane Kirby has reported extensively on the reality of mass migration today. In The Optician of Lampedusa she brings to life the moving testimony of an ordinary man whose late summer boat trip off a Sicilian island unexpectedly turns into a tragic rescue mission.

The Shifting Pools

Author: Zoë Duncan
Publisher: Eye Books (US&CA)
ISBN: 1785630423
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 300

Book Description
Fleeing war and the death of her family, Eve has carefully constructed a new life for herself in London. Yet she is troubled by vivid, disturbing dreams, symptoms of her traumatic past, which intrude increasingly on her daily life. As she is drawn further into her dream world, she finds herself caught up in a fresh battle for survival. A dark, lyrical fantasy about healing and reconnecting with the full richness of the self.

Unaccompanied

Author: Javier Zamora
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781556595110
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Book Description
This gorgeous debut speaks with heart-wrenching intimacy and first-hand experience to the hot-button political issues of immigration and border crossings.

My Fourth Time, We Drowned

Author: Sally Hayden
Publisher: Melville House
ISBN: 1612199461
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 449

Book Description
Winner of The Orwell Prize for Political Writing 2022 Winner of The Michel Déon Prize 2022 Winner of the An Post Irish Book of the Year Award 2022 Winner of the An Post Irish Book Award for Nonfiction 2022 A Financial Times Best Political Book of 2022 A Kirkus Best Nonfiction Book of 2022 A New Yorker Best Book of 2022 A Guardian Best History and Politics Book of 2022 The Western world has turned its back on migrants, leaving them to cope with one of the most devastating humanitarian crises in history. Reporter Sally Hayden was at home in London when she received a message on Facebook: “Hi sister Sally, we need your help.” The sender identified himself as an Eritrean refugee who had been held in a Libyan detention center for months, locked in one big hall with hundreds of others. Now, the city around them was crumbling in a scrimmage between warring factions, and they remained stuck, defenseless, with only one remaining hope: contacting her. Hayden had inadvertently stumbled onto a human rights disaster of epic proportions. From this single message begins a staggering account of the migrant crisis across North Africa, in a groundbreaking work of investigative journalism. With unprecedented access to people currently inside Libyan detention centers, Hayden’s book is based on interviews with hundreds of refugees and migrants who tried to reach Europe and found themselves stuck in Libya once the EU started funding interceptions in 2017. It is an intimate portrait of life for these detainees, as well as a condemnation of NGOs and the United Nations, whose abdication of international standards will echo throughout history. But most importantly, My Fourth Time, We Drowned shines a light on the resilience of humans: how refugees and migrants locked up for years fall in love, support each other through the hardest times, and carry out small acts of resistance in order to survive in a system that wants them to be silent and disappear.

Absolute Poverty in Europe

Author: Gottfried Schweiger
Publisher: Policy Press
ISBN: 1447341317
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 440

Book Description
Engaging systematically with severe forms of poverty in Europe, this important book stimulates academic, public and policy debate by shedding light on aspects of deprivation and exclusion of people in absolute poverty in affluent societies. It examines issues such as access to health care, housing and nutrition, poverty related shame, and violence. The book investigates different policy and civic responses to extreme poverty, ranging from food donations to penalisation and “social cleansing” of highly visible poor and how it is related to concerns of ethics, justice and human dignity.

The Republic of Motherhood

Author: Liz Berry
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 1473564050
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 32

Book Description
*'The Republic of Motherhood' Winner of the Forward Prize for Best Single Poem* ‘I crossed the border into the Republic of Motherhood and found it a queendom, a wild queendom.’ In this bold and resonant gathering of poems, Liz Berry turns her distinctive voice to the transformative experience of new motherhood. Her poems sing the body electric, from the joy and anguish of becoming a mother, through its darkest hours to its brightest days. With honesty and unabashed beauty, they bear witness to that most tender of times – when a new life arrives, and everything changes.

Morning in the Burned House

Author: Margaret Atwood
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
ISBN: 9780395825211
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 148

Book Description
The renowned poet and author of The Handmaid's Tale "brings a swift, powerful energy" to this "intimate and immediate" poetry collection (Publishers Weekly). These beautifully crafted poems -- by turns dark, playful, intensely moving, tender, and intimate -- make up Margaret Atwood's most accomplished and versatile gathering to date, setting foot on the middle ground / between body and word. Some draw on history, some on myth, both classical and popular. Others, more personal, concern themselves with love, with the fragility of the natural world, and with death, especially in the elegiac series of meditations on the death of a parent. But they also inhabit a contemporary landscape haunted by images of the past. Generous, searing, compassionate, and disturbing, this poetry rises out of human experience to seek a level between luminous memory and the realities of the everyday, between the capacity to inflict and the strength to forgive.

Stag's Leap

Author: Sharon Olds
Publisher: Knopf
ISBN: 0307959902
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 114

Book Description
A poignant sequence of poems traces the evolution of a divorce while exploring themes of love, sex, sorrow, memory and freedom as reflected by everyday familiarities and the poignancy of former lovers parting, in a collection by the National Book Critics Circle Award-winning author of The Dead and the Living.

New Boy

Author: Tracy Chevalier
Publisher: Arrow
ISBN: 9781784700249
Category : Betrayal
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Book Description
'A compact and intense read full of twists, turns and intrigue' Daily Express The bestselling author of Girl with a Pearl Earring and The Last Runaway returns with a tale of jealousy, bullying and revenge. Arriving at his fourth school in six years, diplomat's son Osei knows he needs an ally if he is to survive his first day - so he's lucky to hit it off with Dee, the most popular girl in school. But one student can't stand to witness this budding relationship- Ian decides to destroy the friendship between the black boy and the golden girl. By the end of the day, the school and its key players - teachers and pupils alike - will never be the same again. The tragedy of Othello is transposed to a 1970s suburban Washington schoolyard in Tracy Chevalier's powerful drama of friends torn apart.