No matter their ethnicity, country of origin or the political intricacies of their situation, refugees flee their homes in search of safety, opportunity and hope. Novelist Dina Nayeri, who fled Iran as a child with her mother and brother, delves into the experiences of many refugees--their varied details and their broader parallels--in her first nonfiction book, The Ungrateful Refugee.
Nayeri (A Teaspoon of Earth and Sea) begins with her own story of seeking refuge: a long, winding journey with her mother and brother between relatives' houses, refugee camps and, eventually, a new, unfamiliar home in Oklahoma. The middle of Nayeri's book explores her visits to refugee camps, her interviews in several countries with those seeking rescue and those seeking to help them, and her return as an adult to Barba, to the former Italian hotel where she once lived as a refugee. Her story, and the others she tells, have overlapping layers and complexities, but all of them are characterized by waiting, legal trouble, separation from loved ones and a desperate, repeated swing between despair and hope.
Blistering in its unequivocal critiques of legal systems that keep refugees in limbo, yet strikingly layered and nuanced in its storytelling, The Ungrateful Refugee is timely, unsettling, compassionate and deeply compelling. --Katie Noah Gibson, blogger at Cakes, Tea and Dreams