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Nine Lives in the World's Largest Refugee Camp
by Ben Rawlence
To the charity workers, Dabaab refugee camp is a humanitarian crisis; to the Kenyan government, it is a 'nursery for terrorists'; to the western media, it is a dangerous no-go area; but to its half a million residents, it is their last resort.
Situated hundreds of miles from any other settlement, deep within the inhospitable desert of northern Kenya where only thorn bushes grow, Dadaab is a city like no other. Its buildings are made from mud, sticks or plastic, its entire economy is grey, and its citizens survive on rations and luck. Over the course of four years, Ben Rawlence became a first-hand witness to a strange and desperate limbo-land, getting to know many of those who have come there seeking sanctuary. Among them are Guled, a former child soldier who lives for football; Nisho, who scrapes an existence by pushing a wheelbarrow and dreaming of riches; Tawane, the indomitable youth leader; and schoolgirl Kheyro, whose future hangs upon her education.
In City of Thorns, Rawlence interweaves the stories of nine individuals to show what life is like in the camp and to sketch the wider political forces that keep the refugees trapped there. Rawlence combines intimate storytelling with broad socio-political investigative journalism, doing for Dadaab what Katherinee Boo's Behind the Beautiful Forevers did for the Mumbai slums. Lucid, vivid and illuminating, City of Thorns is an urgent human story with deep international repercussions, brought to life through the people who call Dadaab home.
"Starred Review. By combining his own experiences with interviews with residents of Dadaab, [Rawlence] makes the human rights crisis - rarely covered in the media - vivid and immediate for readers....This is a compelling examination of the tragedy of a place where one 'can only survive...by imagining a life elsewhere.'" - Publishers Weekly
"With remarkable intimacy, Rawlence reveals the humanity of these people in crisis who must struggle to survive in the overcrowded camp... A significant, timely, and gloomy tale that reveals the human costs of a growing world crisis." - Kirkus
"At a time when West governments are obsessing over migrant flows, City of Thorns offers unique insights into what prompts people to abandon their ancestral homes in the first place and the dreams that send them questing for a better life." - Michela Wrong, author of In the Footseps of Mr. Kurtz and Borderlines
"To us they are just numbers, but refugees, asylum seekers and economic migrants are names, lives, sons, daughters, lovers, people full of hope and grit. In this book Ben Rawlence has given us a complex tapestry of refugee life without romanticising it. It is like a Brueghel picture in words. An eloquent testimony by a writer with heart." - Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, author of Refusing the Veil and The Settler's Cookbook
"By recounting the stories of a few Rawlence sheds light on all the stories of all in the refugees in all the camps that will never be told. As timely as Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, this book should be required reading." - Aminatta Forna, author of The Devil That Danced on the Water
This information about City of Thorns was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Ben Rawlence is a former researcher for Human Rights Watch in the horn of Africa. He is the author of City of Thorns and Radio Congo and has written for a wide range of publications, including the Guardian, the London Review of Books, and Prospect. He is the founder and director of Black Mountains College and lives with his family in Wales.
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