
My Fourth Time, We Drowned: Seeking Refuge on the World's Deadliest Migration Route (Hardback)
Sally Hayden (author)Published: 31/03/2022

Profoundly shocking, urgent and essential, Hayden's riveting volume about the twenty-first-century migrant crisis places testimony from a wide range of refugees front and centre, revealing an appalling level of abuse, corruption and cruelty - all tacitly sanctioned by European policy.
Winner of the Orwell Prize for Political Writing 2022
Shortlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction 2022
The Western world has turned its back on refugees, fuelling one of the most devastating human rights disasters in history.
In August 2018, Sally Hayden received a Facebook message. 'Hi sister Sally, we need your help,' it read. 'We are under bad condition in Libya prison. If you have time, I will tell you all the story.' More messages followed from more refugees. They told stories of enslavement and trafficking, torture and murder, tuberculosis and sexual abuse. And they revealed something else: that they were all incarcerated as a direct result of European policy.
From there began a staggering investigation into the migrant crisis across North Africa. This book follows the shocking experiences of refugees seeking sanctuary, but it also surveys the bigger picture: the negligence of NGOs and corruption within the United Nations. The economics of the twenty-first-century slave trade and the EU's bankrolling of Libyan militias. The trials of people smugglers, the frustrations of aid workers, the loopholes refugees seek out and the role of social media in crowdfunding ransoms. Who was accountable for the abuse? Where were the people finding solutions? Why wasn't it being widely reported?
At its heart, this is a book about people who have made unimaginable choices, risking everything to survive in a system that wants them to be silent and disappear.
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
ISBN: 9780008445577
Number of pages: 512
Weight: 740 g
Dimensions: 240 x 159 x 42 mm
MEDIA REVIEWS
'Journalism of the most urgent kind' - Financial Times
'[A] devastating, moving and damning account of one of the tragedies of our age... Hayden never flinches in documenting human nature at its worst - its best is shown here, too' - Irish Independent
'The most important work of contemporary reporting I have ever read... I hope that Sally Hayden's work can help to begin a radically new and overdue discussion about Europe's approach to migration and borders' - Sally Rooney
'Compassionate, brave, enraging, beautifully written and incredibly well researched. Hayden exposes the truth about years of grotesque abuse committed against some of the world's most vulnerable people in all of our names' - Oliver Bullough, author of Moneyland
'One of the most important testaments of this awful time in life's history. It is both heartbreaking and stoic. I cry reading any page of it. Sally Hayden is a young and brilliant journalist' - Edna O'Brien, author of The Little Red Chairs
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