What Strange Paradise is a short, quiet book. It’s about a boy who washes up on an unnamed Western island, the sole survivor of a migrant shipwreck, and about his life before and after that moment. More than that, it’s about home, that word the novelist Naguib Mahfouz once defined as not the place you were born, but the place where your attempts to escape cease.
I like to think of What Strange Paradise as a repurposed fairy tale, a lucid dream of a story. I never thought it would get published.
It’s been about ten years since I fist started thinking about the things that would eventually coalesce into this novel. In 2012 I was back in Egypt, the country of my birth. I was still working as a journalist back then, and was on assignment covering the aftermath of the Arab Spring. I remember driving around with an old high school buddy who was complaining about how rent had become exorbitant in recent years. For reference, I asked him what apartments in his building were going for these days.
“Well, do you mean the locals’ price or the Syrians’ price?” he responded.
I quickly learned that, for the new influx of Syrians who’d moved to Egypt to escape the civil war, the price of an apartment (as well as pretty well anything else) could safely be tripled. They were a readily exploitable population, fit to be squeezed for every last dime.
“I mean, what are they going to do,” my friend said, “go somewhere else?”
Of course, many of them were trying to go somewhere else. They were trying to come here, to the place where I’ve spent the last twenty years of my life. The West.
Over the years, I sketched out many paths to a story that would get at the casualness of this particular brand of cruelty, the ways in which we have enabled a society that thinks nothing of a permanent and permanently expendable underclass. It eventually occurred to me that I was, in writing about compelled migration, essentially writing about the collision of dueling fantasies – one that saw huge swaths of human beings as barbarians at the gate, and another that saw the West as a cure for all ills. I decided I would write something equally fantastical; I decided I would take the fable of Peter Pan – the boy who never grows up – and use it to tell a different kind of story.
From the moment I started writing, I felt an overwhelming anxiety about the project. My first novel, American War, had been fairly successful, and I think the professionally prudent thing to do would be to continue in that mode (indeed, the novel I’m working on now is as speculative and worldbuilding-centered as American War; it’s a mode I write in quite often). Instead, I wrote a second novel that was fundamentally different than my first in so many ways – quieter, not nearly as speculative, set in an entirely different part of the world). It was the book I felt I needed to write, and so I was going to write it, but I was scared. I still am.
I have an uneasy relationship with awards, and God knows I’ve lost so many more of them than I’ve won. But to be recognized with a PNBA Book Award is an especially gratifying thing. Without the booksellers in this part of the continent, who have shown me so much kindness over the years, I can safely say I’d probably have no career at all.
Celebrate Omar El Akkad and the other winners of 2022 Pacific Northwest Book Awards with the virtual event on Zoom Feb 8, 2022 at 6:00 PM Pacific Time. REGISTER NOW.
Nwbooklovers posts original essays from this year’s award winners as featured posts in January and February. You can enjoy essays from past winners of the PNBA Book Award (including El Akkad in 2018) in our archive.