Lecture, Book Sale & Signing, Refreshments
Friends Room at Central Library, 1000 Avocado Avenue, Newport Beach CA 92660
Thursday, March 23, 7:00pm - 8:30pm
What Strange Paradise
Powerful and compelling, What Strange Paradise (2021) is a story about a boy who survives a refugee passage, and a girl whose homeland feels fractured but dares to save him. Author and journalist Omar El Akkad has beautifully woven a compelling story about hope and despair, empathy and indifference, against a backdrop of the all-too-common dehumanization and dismissal of the global refugee crisis. The book won the Giller Prize, the Oregon Book Award for fiction, and was shortlisted for the Aspen Words Literary Prize. His debut novel American War (2018) has been translated into thirteen languages and was selected by the BBC as one of 100 novels that changed our world. His journalism has earned the National Newspaper Award for Investigative Journalism and the Goff Penny Award for young journalists. El-Akkad fiction and non-fiction writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Guardian, and Le Monde.
