Summary

Part One is titled “Escape,” and subtitled “on good faith, credible risk, and opportunism” (3). The author begins Chapter 1, and indeed the book, with the narrative of her arrival in Italy as a refugee with her mother and younger brother. They were, she says, housed in an abandoned hotel in the town of Barba, over-filled with a large number of refugees from several different countries. She describes how relationships developed as they all waited for news about the next phase of their journey as a result of everyone sharing their stories. This leads her to consideration of the importance of stories in the lives of refugees, and how those stories become different depending on who hears and/or heard them. The stories refugees tell each other, she says, are different from those that refugees tell the officials who are deciding their fate. The...