Susan (a shrink with a lot of time on her hands) says to Tom, 'Will you stay in New York and tell me all you know?' and he does, for nearly 600 mostly-bloated pages of flashbacks depicting The Family Wingo of swampy Colleton County: a beautiful mother, a brutal shrimper father (the Great Santini alive and kicking), and Tom and Savannah's much-admired older brother, Luke. Savannah, it turns out, is catatonic, and before the suicide attempt had completely assumed the identity of a dead friend-the implication being that she couldn't stand being a Wingo anymore. When he hears that his fierce, beautiful twin sister Savannah, a well-known New York poet, has once again attempted suicide, he escapes his present emasculation by flying north to meet Savannah's comely psychiatrist, Susan Lowenstein. Tom Wingo is an unemployed South Carolinian football coach whose internist wife is having an affair with a pompous cardiac man. This is an equally incisive, if more conventional, novel than the author's debut, American War (2017).Ī compassionate snapshot of one Syrian refugee's struggle to plot a course for home.Ī flabby, fervid melodrama of a high-strung Southern family from Conroy ( The Great Santini, The Lords of Discipline), whose penchant for overwriting once again obscures a genuine talent. Sometimes they just get the two confused') even as it produces a few admittedly didactic monologues (a smuggler lectures the migrants: 'You are the temporary object of their fraudulent outrage'). El Akkad's compelling, poetic prose captures the precarity and desperation of people pushed to the brink, and the wide-ranging dialogue levels frequently trenchant critiques (Americans are 'comfortable with violence, not sex.

In chapters that alternate between Amir's harrowing, multiday voyage and his fortunate encounter with Vänna, a teenage islander, upon washing ashore, El Akkad pieces together the strands of Amir's story, past and present, as they lead up to and diverge from that fateful moment at sea. After accidentally boarding a repurposed fishing boat heading north from Alexandria, Amir must contend with punishing seas, unpredictable weather, exhausting hunger, and an eventual storm that leads to the overcrowded ship's capsizing. In recent years, images of discarded life jackets piling up on the shores of Greek islands have shocked the world, as migrants from the Middle East pursue uncertain futures in Europe or elsewhere in the fabled 'West.' In this timely, captivating novel, El Akkad dramatizes the story of one such traveler: Amir Utu, a 9-year-old boy who unwittingly undertakes the turbulent journey. A migrant boy finds an unexpected ally in his accidental voyage across the sea.

American war by omar el akkad