And I know you reported on the Arab Spring. “She had seen so many over the last year,” El Akkad writes about one character’s reaction to the young victims that end up isolated on Greek shores, “alone, malnourished orphaned by war or by sea made into the undercurrents of themselves, broken in ways that rendered them unable to continue as children and yet a part of them left childlike forever.” El Akkad, also a journalist, lives in Portland with his wife and two children, and we spoke by Zoom about Egypt, fables, and fiction that doesn’t forget.ĬHRISTOPHER BOLLEN: Before we launch into your novel, I wanted to ask you about your relationship with Egypt. El Akkad may have written a bleak fantasy story, but it’s deeply rooted in the visceral, real-life horrors of the ongoing refugee crisis and it’s hard to think of more capable and talented hands to tackle the brutality and humanity of Amir’s plight. The timeline of What Strange Paradise is much closer to the present day, creating a two-pronged narrative, with chapters that alternate between “Before” and “After”: before the island when Amir inadvertently boards a human smuggling ship in Alexandria and ends up weathering a terrifying voyage through on the sea and after Amir leaves the beach, linking up with a sympathetic Greek teenager named Vänna, who helps him escape the clutches of a war-hardened army colonel. El Akkad’s first novel, 2017’s American War, jumped into the dystopian future to depict a second Civil War breaking out in a ransacked, climate-wrecked United States roiling with ideology and violence. In more ways than one, these texts serve as unexpected guides to El Akkad’s luminous, heartbreaking novel about a young Syrian refugee named Amir who washes up on a small unnamed Greek island, the only survivor of a boat of hopeful, lost souls fleeing their respective home countries in hopes of asylum in Europe. One is from Ambrose Bierce’s 1890 hallucinogenic short story “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge,” the other from J.M. Two literary quotations serve as epigraphs of Omar El Akkad’s second novel What Strange Paradise.

Author omar el akkad