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.
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