REACHING MITHYMNA

A Canadian novelist’s travels among desperate Middle Eastern refugees adrift in the Aegean Sea region.

If the epigraph—a soulful invocation by Leonard Cohen—doesn’t sufficiently grab your attention, the drowned children and babies a few pages later certainly will. Heighton’s searing memoir of embedding among the volunteers takes us back to 2015, when the hapless Greek government received assistance from the U.N. and dozens of nongovernmental agencies. At the same time, the Turkish government “accepted an offer from the EU: two billion euros to blockade their own coastline, for now, thus detaining the refugees on that side”—refugees that were attempting to make the sea crossing to the Greek island of Lesvos. During his travels, the author met not just Syrians, but also Kurds, Gazans, Afghans, and Moroccans. Some readers may be surprised to learn that not all of the refugees were destitute: Just three days earlier, two of the Syrians had been working well-paid jobs at a Damascus bank but left when they received draft notices from Bashar al-Assad’s army (“a death sentence”). Heighton also includes maddening information about the traffickers—e.g., their money-saving tricks of having random refugees pilot the boats or handing out fake life vests. This is far more than a traveler’s tale, as the author hints at in the title, preferring the town’s ancient name of Mithymna (now Molyvos). The refugees remind him of the Greeks who fled the Turkish coast a century before as well as fleeing survivors of the Trojan War many centuries earlier. Heighton embarked on his journey to help where he could, but he was also driven by the haunting memory of his Greek mother. By the end, he writes, “I’ve no home to return to, I see, just a place I can no longer belong in.”

This is the kind of book you won’t forget even if you wish you could.