Overview

“This stunning meditation on nostalgia, heritage, and compassion asks us to dismantle the stories we’ve been told—and told ourselves—in order to naturalize the forms of injustice we’ve come to understand as order.” —Leslie Jamison, author of The Empathy Exams   When and how did migration become a crime? Why does ancient Greece remain so important to the West’s idea of itself? How does nostalgia fuel the exclusion and demonization of migrants today?      In 2021, Lauren Markham went to Greece, in search of her own Greek heritage and to cover the aftermath of a fire that burned down the largest refugee camp in Europe. Almost no one had wanted the camp—not activists, not the country’s growing neo-fascist movement, not even the government. But almost immediately, on scant evidence, six young Afghan refugees were arrested for the crime. Markham soon saw that she was tracing a broader narrative, rooted not only in centuries of global history but also in myth. A mesmerizing, trailblazing synthesis of reporting, history, memoir, and essay, A Map of Future Ruins helps us see that the stories we tell about migration don’t just explain what happened. They are oracles: they predict the future.

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9780593545577

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Reviews

Advance praise for A Map of Future Ruins: “A searing, propulsive exploration of violence and grace, this stunning meditation on nostalgia, heritage, and compassion asks us to dismantle the stories we’ve been told—and told ourselves—in order to naturalize the forms of injustice we’ve come to understand as order. In their place, Markham offers a map sketched with ghostly, rearranging ink that makes room for new forms of witnessing and care.” —Leslie Jamison, author of The Empathy Exams “In this brilliant, timely meditation on immigration and refugees, Lauren Markham explores how the stories we tell about borders and who belongs can harden our hearts or help to open them. The threads she follows, emerging from personal narrative, reporting, history, and philosophy, come together deftly, weaving a tapestry as moving as it is illuminating.” —Rebecca Solnit, author of Hope in the Dark, A Field Guide to Getting Lost, and Men Explain Things to Me “A masterful, multilayered story by a writer with a sharp, questioning mind and a big heart.”  —Adam Hochschild, author of American Midnight and King Leopold’s Ghost   “Structurally inventive, keenly observed and compellingly told, A Map of Future Ruins is a masterpiece of narrative journalism. Markham’s investigative skills combine with exquisite prose in a story of two crises: the current refugee crisis affecting the Greek islands and the long overlooked identity crisis within White America, whose preoccupation with ‘Western culture’ as an origin myth she traces both expansively and intimately.” —Aminatta Forna, author of Happiness

Advance praise for A Map of Future Ruins: “In this brilliant, timely meditation on immigration and refugees, Lauren Markham explores how the stories we tell about borders and who belongs can harden our hearts or help to open them. The threads she follows, emerging from personal narrative, reporting, history, and philosophy, come together deftly, weaving a tapestry as moving as it is illuminating.” —Rebecca Solnit, author of Hope in the Dark, A Field Guide to Getting Lost, and Men Explain Things to Me “A masterful, multilayered story by a writer with a sharp, questioning mind and a big heart.”  —Adam Hochschild, author of American Midnight and King Leopold’s Ghost   “Structurally inventive, keenly observed and compellingly told, A Map of Future Ruins is a masterpiece of narrative journalism. Markham’s investigative skills combine with exquisite prose in a story of two crises: the current refugee crisis affecting the Greek islands and the long overlooked identity crisis within White America, whose preoccupation with ‘Western culture’ as an origin myth she traces both expansively and intimately.” —Aminatta Forna, author of Happiness

Author Information

Lauren Markham is the author of the award-winning The Far Away Brothers: Two Young Migrants and the Making of an American Life. She has been working with migrants for two decades and has written about migration and other social issues in The New York Times Magazine, The Guardian, The New York Review of Books, and other publications. She lives in Berkeley, CA.

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