Reaching Mithymna describes the Syrian refugee crisis from a Canadian volunteer's perspective. Secondary theme of the search for identity, familial and ethnic or cultural: Heighton's mother emigrated from Greece.
Will appeal to politically-minded readers interested in current events, readers of memoir, first-generation North Americans, readers interested in diaspora narratives, readers interested in the intersections of poetry and protest/political action (cf Carolyn Forche's poetry of witness.)
Content comps include Orwell's Homage to Catalonia, Theresa Thornhill's Hara Hotel (Verso; pb not yet released), Kate Evans' Threads, graphic nonfiction on the refugee situation at Calais. (Verso; no pb), Roberta Gately's Footprints in the Dust (about Africa and her decades working as a nurse there)
Heighton is a highly regarded novelist, short story writer, and poet. His novel Afterlands was a New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice, a "best of year" selection in ten publications in Canada, the USA, and the UK, and has been optioned for film by Pall Grimsson and is in pre-production.
Nightingale Won't Let You Sleep, a book of fiction about refugees set in Cyprus, was praised by Annie Proulx ("This book won't let the reader sleep... a rich and disturbing literary thriller") and received a starred review in Library Journal.
NYT review and Granta excerpt are expected.
