Overview

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 European Union started funding interceptions in 2017. It is an intimate portrait of life for these detainees, as well as a condemnation of nongovernmental organizations 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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9798200997763

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Reviews

My Fourth Time, We Drowned is journalism of the most urgent kind. -- Financial Times (London) My Fourth Time, We Drowned is the most important work of contemporary reporting I have ever read. -- Sally Rooney, #1 New York Times bestselling author A deeply researched and harrowing chronicle. -- Foreign Policy Aoife McMahon's narration is extraordinary...McMahon voices the fears and desires of the detainees in ways that make audio the ideal format...Winner of the AudioFile Earphones Award. -- AudioFile Not simply a catalogue of misery: it is a meticulously documented record of the complicity of the very organizations that are meant to be forces of good. -- Times Literary Supplement (London) Perhaps no better testament to the racist double standard at the core of European border policy. -- The Intercept Readers should...let Hayden's vital reporting make them reconsider their view of what makes a moral world. -- The Baffler The narrative is consistently harrowing, revealing the complexities within a global crisis that lacks an easy solution, especially as the numbers of refugees mount. -- Kirkus Reviews (starred review) This sobering account shines a spotlight on an underreported tragedy. -- Publishers Weekly

Author Information

Sally Hayden is an Irish journalist based between the United Kingdom and Uganda, focused on migration, conflict, and humanitarian crises. In 2019, she was named as one of Forbes' '30 Under 30' in media in Europe, in part because of her work on refugee issues. She is the Africa correspondent for the Irish Times. Her work on Libya has been featured by the New York Times, the London Guardian, Channel 4 News, CNN International, Al Jazeera, Time, BBC, Die Zeit, Der Spiegel, the Sunday Times, the Telegraph, ITV News, and other outlets across the world. She has reported on other international stories for the Washington Post, the Financial Times Magazine, and the Thomson Reuters Foundation. Aoife McMahon, an Earphones Award-winning narrator, is an Irish actress with extensive experience in theater and television. She won the 2002 Best Actress Gemini Award for Random Passage opposite Colm Meaney. She has also performed with the Royal Shakespeare Company at the Old Vic and has toured the United Kingdom with Goodnight Mister Tom.

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