What Strange Paradise by Omar El Akkad

What Strange Paradise is a novel by Omar El Akkad.

Championed by Tareq Hadhad

CBC Books Posted: Jan 22, 2021 1:08 PM EST | Last Updated: July 14, 2022

Tareq Hadhad is championing What Strange Paradise by Omar El Akkad. (CBC)

Tareq HadhadchampionedWhat Strange ParadisebyOmar El AkkadonCanada Reads2022.

Canada Readstookplace March 28-31, 2022The debates were hosted byAli Hassanandbroadcast onCBC Radio One,CBC TV,CBC Gemand onCBC Books.

Meet theCanada Reads2022contenders

More bodies have washed up on the shores of a small island. Another over-filled, ill-equipped, dilapidated ship has sunk under the weight of its too many passengers: Syrians, Ethiopians, Egyptians, Lebanese, Palestinians, all of them desperate to escape untenable lives in their homelands. And only one has made the passage: nine-year-old Amir, a Syrian boy who has the good fortune to fall into the hands not of the officials but of Vanna: a teenage girl, native to the island, who lives inside her own sense of homelessness in a place and among people she has come to disdain. And though she and the boy are complete strangers, though they don't speak a common language, she determines to do whatever it takes to save him.

LISTEN | Podcast on What Strange Paradise

Canada Reads31:16Canada Reads 2022: Get to know What Strange Paradise

In this introduction to the novel What Strange Paradise, discover what the book is about and why entrepreneur and former Syrian refugee Tareq Hadhad chose it for Canada Reads 2022.

In alternating chapters, we learn the story of the boy's life and how he came to be on the boat; and we follow the girl and boy as they make their way toward a vision of safety. But as the novel unfurls, we begin to understand that this is not merely the story of two children finding their way through a hostile world, it is the story of our collective moment in this time: of empathy and indifference, of hope and despair and of the way each of those things can blind us to reality, or guide us to a better one. (From McClelland & Stewart)

Omar El Akkad is a Canadian journalist and author who currently lives in Portland. He is also the author of the novelAmerican War, which was defended onCanada Reads2018 by actor Tahmoh Penikett.What Strange Paradisewonthe 2021Scotiabank Giller Prize.The $100,000 prize is the biggest prize in Canadian literature.

From the book

The child lies on the shore. All around him the beach is littered with the wreckage of the boat and the wreckage of its passengers: shards of decking, knapsacks cleaved and gutted, bodies frozen in unnatural contortion. Dispossessed of nightfall's temporary burial, the dead ferment indecency. There's too much of spring in the day, too much light.

Facedown, with his arms outstretched, the child appears from a distance as though playing at flight. And so too in the bodies that surround him, though distended with seawater and hardening, there flicker the remnants of some silent levitation, a severance from the laws of being.

Why Omar El Akkad wrote What Strange Paradise

"It's a fable, or at least a repurposed fable. It's the story of Peter Pan inverted and recast as the story of a contemporary child refugee. It opens with the scene of a shipwreck on an unnamed western island. There's a small boy named Amir, who's the sole survivor of the shipwreck.

"From that moment onwards, the book splits into two halves alternating chapters. The chapters alternate between what happens once he arrives on the island and everything that led up to him being on the island in the first place. It is, in my mind, a repurposed fairy tale, and it is very much based on Peter Pan.

"But unless you have a very intimate familiarity with Peter Pan as a story, it doesn't come out overtly. A lot of the stuff is beneath the surface."

TheCanada Reads2022 contenders

Interviews with Omar El Akkad

Tareq Hadhad champions What Strange Paradise by Omar El Akkad

2 years ago

1:28

Tareq Hadhad argues that Omar El Akkad's novel humanizes the experience of refugees in a cynical time.

18:05Omar El Akkad on What Strange Paradise

Omar El Akkad in conversation with Shelagh Rogers about his novel, on What Strange Paradise.

The Sunday Magazine22:32What the honesty of childhood reveals about the ugliness in our world

80 million people were displaced worldwide by mid-2020 and as novelist Omar El Akkad sees it, that number will grow as climate change worsens. He joins Piya Chattopadhyay to discuss his latest novel What Strange Paradise.

The Sunday Magazine22:32What the honesty of childhood reveals about the ugliness in our world

Book trailer: What Strange Paradise by Omar El Akkad

2 years ago

1:09

Omar El Akkad's novel will be championed by Tareq Hadhad on Canada Reads 2022.

More about What Strange Paradise

Other books byOmar El Akkad

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