In "What Strange Paradise" (Knopf), Omar El Akkad, the author of "American War," offers a heartbreaking novel that puts a face on the staggering statistics of the tens of millions of people displaced from their homes as the result of persecution and violence. .

The child lies on the shore.

The island, despite the debris, is calm.

In time a crowd gathers near the site of the shipwreck, tourists and locals alike.

The eldest of them, an arthritic fisherman driven in recent years by plummeting cherubfish stocks to kitchen work at a nearby resort, says that it's never been like this before on the island.

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Between them, the coast guard and the morgue keep a partial count of the dead, and as of this morning it stands at 1,026 but this number is as much an abstraction as the dead themselves are to the people who live here, to whom all the shipwrecks of the previous year are a single shipwreck, all the bodies a single body.

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The child blinks the silt from his eyes; the world begins to take shape.

The boy's neck is stiff and it hurts to move, but he turns slightly in the direction of the sea.

Farther out, the water sheds its sandy complexion and turns a turquoise of such clarity that the tourists' sailboats seem to float atop their own shadows.

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The man turns, first to his colleague and then, his voice even louder now, to the officers stationed at the edge of the beach.

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Pinned between the water and the land, the child turns toward the sheltering trees

Copyright © 2021 by Omar El Akkad

© 2021 CBS Interactive Inc

Copyright © 2021 CBS Interactive Inc