My Fourth Time, We Drowned

My Fourth Time, We Drowned Synopsis

"A magnificent, engagé investigative report… [an] act of witness...It is clear from [Hayden's book] that the current politics of immigration have turned & twisted human nature against itself and our own kind and are fostering unimaginable maltreatment of those who wish only to survive and live a better life… [It] strongly convey[s] the urgency of fundamentally rethinking immigration policy… It is already late to act, but that is a poor reason for inaction." - The New York Review of Books

Winner Terzani Prize/Premio Terzani 2024
Winner 'journalist of the year', Irish Journalism Awards 2023
Winner best 'foreign coverage', Irish Journalism Awards 2023
Finalist in the 2023 BookTube Prize
Nominated for the Jan Michalski Prize for Literature 2023
Finalist for the New York Public Library's Helen Bernstein Book Award for Excellence in Journalism 2023
A Sunday Times 'one to watch' 2023
Winner of The Orwell Prize for Political Writing 2022
Winner of The Michel Déon Prize 2022
Winner of the An Post Irish Book of the Year Award 2022
Winner of the An Post Irish Book Award for Nonfiction 2022
A Financial Times Best Political Book of 2022
A Kirkus Best Nonfiction Book of 2022
A New Yorker Best Book of 2022
A Guardian Best History and Politics Book of 2022

The Western world has turned its back on migrants, leaving them to cope with one of the most devastating humanitarian crises in history.

Reporter Sally Hayden was at home in London when she received a message on Facebook: "Hi sister Sally, we need your help." The sender identified himself as an Eritrean refugee who had been held in a Libyan detention center for months, locked in one big hall with hundreds of others. Now, the city around them was crumbling in a scrimmage between warring factions, and they remained stuck, defenseless, with only one remaining hope: contacting her. Hayden had inadvertently stumbled onto a human rights disaster of epic proportions.

From this single message begins a staggering account of the migrant crisis across North Africa, in a groundbreaking work of investigative journalism. With unprecedented access to people currently inside Libyan detention centers, Hayden's book is based on interviews with hundreds of refugees and migrants who tried to reach Europe and found themselves stuck in Libya once the EU started funding interceptions in 2017.

It is an intimate portrait of life for these detainees, as well as a condemnation of NGOs and the United Nations, whose abdication of international standards will echo throughout history. But most importantly, My Fourth Time, We Drowned shines a light on the resilience of humans: how refugees and migrants locked up for years fall in love, support each other through the hardest times, and carry out small acts of resistance in order to survive in a system that wants them to be silent and disappear.

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