Winner of the Scotiabank Giller Prize, What Strange Paradise by Omar El Akkad is a tender drama for our times, featuring two children on the run from authorities on the serene Greek island of Kos. El Akkad's exquisite second novel (after American War) is written with a fluid beauty that captures nature's ferocious power and glory. The story opens with a boat and bodies, including a child, washed onto shore close to a luxury hotel, a horrific scene. The child, an eight-year-old Syrian boy named Amir, awakens and flees into a nearby forest. Colonel Dimitri Kethros is in charge of "rounding up the illegals" on the island, and he is determined to track down the boy. Fortunately for Amir, he meets a local teenage girl named Vänna who offers to help him. Egyptian American journalist El Akkad is a writer of global sensibilities, deploying his formidable craft to speak to the crisis of humanity at political borders. --Shahina Piyarali, reviewer