Sally Hayden

My Fourth Time, We Drowned

by Sally Hayden

***🏆  A Five Books Book of the Year ***

***Winner of the 2022 Orwell Prize for Political Writing***

“My Fourth Time, We Drowned is another extraordinary investigation of a topic which people want to keep hidden, in this case the reality of the lives of migrants trying to get into Europe across the Mediterranean who have travelled there from many parts. It tells the story of extraordinary suffering that families go through to send family members to Europe, and of the migrants themselves, at the hands of traffickers, of militias and, indeed, indirectly, at the hands of international organizations that haven’t cared as much as they should have about their well-being.

What is especially rich about the book is that the migrants themselves speak not after the fact, but during their ordeals. So, although they are very much out of sight when it comes to television and the usual forms of journalism, the individual stories are told through often secret exchanges on social media. And they’re told extraordinarily compellingly.

The book is a critique of the EU and the UN for their policies, for keeping these migrants out, and their systematic indifference to their suffering. It’s very much—as many of these books are—a book for our time.”

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