I could talk about this book for hours, but I know I'm going to struggle a coherent review together. There is so much in this book, and yet it reads as easily as a simple story. 

Part of the simplicity is the tightness of the setting: you can feel the wind and rain on Lesbos, and the tightness of the timeframe is always present.  This feels the most geographically bounded of Alameddine's work I've read - while the story ranges through our characters memories to Lebanon, the US and Syria the story itself is told in days on a Greek island.

This is, at a point, a story about Syrian refugees. But it is also not - it is also a story about the impossibility of writing about that with any meaning. So we are given Mina, a compelling central protagonist whose role as a doctor anchors her place in the refugee camp. And, at first in our peripheral vision and then more and more central, we are given the author himself, paralysed by his own inability to process his viewpoint, to untangle his relationships. And then we have a Syrian family who are too busy processing their own grief and needs to really give a crap about the various emotions of the volunteers. Of course, there are others - young voluntourists taking selfies with the boats and flirting with each other, the magnificent and ever-prepared Anna - another version of someone who has exactly what is needed - and Rasheed, who provides a bridge between the refugees and our other characters.

Mina herself is anchored by family. Her wife, back in the US, and her brother, who travels from Lebanon. These two tether Mina's selves, her own migration experience, positioning her as someone who has both lost and gained. The story of her reconnection with her brother provides a big dose of the hope and the redemption in the narrative, as well as forgiveness and irreparable connection. 

It is important that this is not simply a book about refugees. Alameddine deftly sidesteps the perils of selling human-engineered disaster and others' trauma as entertainment. This is a story about a group of connections, and a group of people, some of whom are refugees. It is not that we should look away, but that we should look as actors not bystanders, and accept this is our world too. 

The book is written for an American audience, and as an Australian there were aspects of the setting that were inherently challenging. To see a portrayal of refugees which did not involve the daily demonisation that is present in my country was almost perplexing. While the book pokes gently at college kids getting selfies, for example, I am just trying to imagine a world in which this will engender mainstream praise and not abuse or scepticism (Many Australians do help refugees of course, but it is a minority who even agree it is a good thing).  This book is set in 2016 - just before Europe slammed the doors to Syrian refugees. It is also two years after the fifteen-year-old Mehdi Ali was recognised as a refugee in Australia but six years prior to his release from prison. Ali is not alone - Australia imprisons refugees routinely, imposing torturous conditions in an attempt at 'deterrence' - it is so much cleaner when people die at home.  Alammedine refers only briefly to Australia, as a country brash enough to openly refuse to take any non-Christian Syrian refugees, despite having 1 million citizens with Lebanese heritage.

But this isn't a depressing book. It is, in many ways, a triumph of humanity and capacity to love in the ruins. It's also very funny - often at the author's own expense. At first the appearance of Alameddine in the text drove me nuts - why is he there? Why is Alameddine pointing so dramatically to him(self)? He wants you to understand why he is there, but he also wants the reader to acknowledge the act of reading.  Alameddine tells us that he is positioned in the text, but in doing so reminds us that we are too (and the title might have tipped me off). And then he gets - never too much, never into arch territory - to make other literary references, to draw all the worlds of literature together in reminding us that there is always a connection. In many ways, all of the characters are alone (as we all are) but none so much as the author. The style however, keeps circling back around to how we find each other. Little stories appear - the tale of a woman in a refugee camp who plasters her pantry with sequins and the gay man who instantly loves her for it. A difficult tale of Rasheed teaching two young gay men to "demasculinise" in order to convince authorities of their sexuality. (Point at the rings like Beyonce!), encapsulating so much about race, sexuality and policing of boundaries.  And then, in many ways, the gentle shaking of the fourth wall brings all of us, in a kind of celebration of literature and it's power to reconnect. In this way, the book does manage to be about Alameddine in the end after all - about why we write and the inevitability of it, even in the face of fucking it up.

So yes, I liked this quite a bit :)