Khaled Hosseini encountered the image of Alan Kurdi through a father’s eyes.

“Like everyone else, I was shattered,” says the No. 1 New York Times bestselling author of The Kite Runner, A Thousand Splendid Suns, and And the Mountains Echoed. He was devastated by the widely seen photographs depicting the three-year-old Syrian refugee’s body on a Turkish beach, lifeless, after the raft intended to carry his family to safety capsized.

“I thought of what his father must be going through, seeing those very same photographs,” says Hosseini, who has two children. “How difficult that must be.”

To pay tribute to Kurdi, his family, and thousands of other refugees attempting to escape war, persecution, and poverty by sea, Hosseinipenned Sea Prayer, a brief lyrical story, with stirring watercolor illustrations by London-based artist Dan Williams. Proceeds from the book will benefit refugees around the world through the UN Refugee Agency and the Khaled Hosseini Foundation.

Sea Prayer is written in the form of a refugee father’s internal monologue, directed to his sleeping son, on the eve of a planned escape by sea. He offers his cherished memories of his own boyhood in Homs, Syria, prosperous in peacetime, “the crowded lanes smelling of fried kibbeh,” with people of all ethnicities and religions effortlessly mixing in a marketplace:

                                                In the bustling Old City,

                                                a mosque for us Muslims,

                                                a church for our Christian neighbors,

                                                and a grand souk for us all

                                                to haggle over gold pendants and

                                                fresh produce and bridal dresses.

 These memories stand in painful contrast to those of his son, growing up in a time of civil war:

                                               You know a bomb crater

                                               can be made into a swimming hole.

                                               You have learned

                                               dark blood is better news

                                               than bright.

For a viable future, the family must flee, leaving behind their home, their possessions, friends, and family. It is a life-changing, heartbreaking decision no father, no mother, no loved one makes lightly, Hosseini says.

“Imagine how utterly terrifying it is to be at sea,” he says, “to not be able to swim, in the middle of the night, pitch black, waves high as walls around you, and your life in the hand of smugglers whose entire business model survives on your suffering. These are agonizing decisions made by families, painful decisions, born out of desperate circumstances.”

Hosseini’s affecting words are accompanied by Williams’ exquisite, evocative watercolor paintings. Warm tones of ochre and carnelian in the city scenes give way to greys and, as the family departs in an open vessel on a nighttime sea.

“All I can do is pray,” Hosseini writes.

Achingly beautiful, Kirkus calls Sea Prayer “an emotional gut-punch …. impossible to read without feeling intense compassion for those—and there are thousands—whose lives resemble those of the characters in the book” (starred review).

“We hear a thousand people have died this year, or a boat capsized off the coast of Libiya and 200 people, refugees and migrants, died,” Hosseini says. Every life lost in such striving is “a universe of human experience and hope and emotion and fear and love”—far more than a death toll can ever explain.

“Stories are antidotes to the dehumanizing factor that numbers can have,” he says. “We should never lose sight of the human toll that lurks right behind those numbers.”

Megan Labrise is a staff writer and cohost of the Fully Booked podcast.