BEYOND THE SAND AND SEA

An exile's dream of coming to America.

Foreign correspondent McCormick, an editor at Foreign Affairs, makes his book debut with a riveting narrative of the plight of refugees. Based in Kenya from 2015 to 2018 as the Africa editor of Foreign Policy, McCormick met Asad Hussein, who had been born in a refugee camp in 1995 a few years after his family fled war-torn Somalia. Now home to second and third generations of refugees, “permanent exiles facing a lifetime in waiting,” the facility houses hundreds of thousands who live in brutal conditions, many—like Asad’s family—applying for resettlement. McCormick recounts the family’s frustrations as their application failed repeatedly, derailed by endless snarls. Drawing on copious interviews, the author creates a palpable sense of life in the camp, his notebooks “overflowing with damning testimony” of the refugees’ victimization at the hands of corrupt or malevolent officials, even before Trump’s policies exacerbated their situation. Asad’s older sister, who had married, had been able to settle in the U.S. while the rest of the family languished. When his parents’ case finally was settled—after 13 years—Asad and his siblings were left behind. Determined to find a way to leave, Asad devoted himself to studying hard, reading in his school’s library, and writing, sending essays to newspapers and magazines. In 2016, the New York Times Magazine accepted a piece about his sister’s return visit to the camp. “Suddenly,” McCormick writes, “the self-taught refugee writer” became a minor celebrity. Doors opened—scholarships, an internship—but were just as likely to slam shut. “The cascade of Asad-related crises became a kind of drumbeat to our lives,” writes the author. Problems at his school, with the College Board, the Kenyan government, and the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, “all threatened to upend his best-laid plans at various times.” Yet, as McCormick discloses in the opening pages of this moving book, Asad prevailed, an exception to the lives of so many others.

An intimate and rigorously reported portrait of desperate lives.