Sort of Books

THE TRUTH ABOUT THE SMALL BOATS CRISIS by @milesellingham and @jackjeffery50 What Nigel Farage won’t tell you A decade ago, an area of 1.5 square miles north of Calais’s N216 motorway housed almost 10,000 people. It was called the jungle. There were radio stations, churches, mosques, a market street, even a nightclub. But in the end government consensus couldn’t abide the jungle – it became too unstable, unsanitary and unsafe. Demolition crews arrived in 2016. It was decided nothing like the jungle should ever grow back. But world events kept pushing more people towards France. A new, deadly route opened: boats began to arrive in Kent. These boats unearthed a buried fear in Britain. The migrants metamorphosed from unwitting fragments forced into motion by humanitarian crisis to an invasive force of criminals and sexual predators. Politicians and agitators insist they are a threat to British school girls. In our reporting, we have been deep into the camps across northern France and spoken at length to the migrants who passed through. We’ve approached aid workers, politicians, locals, policemen and town planners. What emerges pertains not just to a failure of policy, but a failure of humanity. The living conditions are appalling. The border has taught the children a new game: they check each other’s passports. Nearly every story begins with an escape. Of everyone we spoke to, only one stated that he had left because of the job market. The rest recalled genocidal militias, airstrikes, repressive regimes, religious persecution, torture, mutilation and death. The Labour government has tried a new approach, announcing its “one in, one out” policy. Only two of the migrants we spoke to were aware of it. Yet one of those two could explain the legal intricacies of the Dublin Regulation and why the UK’s withdrawal was to his advantage. ‘‘The main reason I am coming to Britain is because of protection from deportation, because of Dublin.” It’s possible Nigel Farage will win the next election, and turn Britain into a country of mass detention and deportation – a place where asylum is banned. Perhaps then migrants will think about the UK differently. Perhaps we all will.

For the Atlantic, I wrote about my friend Lore Segal: theatlantic.com/books/archive/…

Lore Segal has died. Do please listen to our recent episode on her novel Her First American. She was a truly remarkable woman and a great writer. RIP. backlisted.fm/episodes/222-l…

New book review on my personal site: ‘Cairn’ by @KathleenJamie. (TL;DR: Fantastic!) richardcarter.com/reviews/book-r…

New episode up now. Her First American by Lore Segal, with guests Jeffery Renard Allen and Nat Jansz in discussion with @johnmitchinson and @i_am_mill_i_am. backlisted.fm/episodes/222-l…

My review of @KathleenJamie's Cairn (@SortofBooks) is in this month's edition of the always-excellent @Resurgence_mag. I seem to get less coherent as a reviewer the better the book - so this is definitely not my best work. But the book is astounding. Please buy it.

Christina Riley from The Nature Library reviews @KathleenJamie’s ‘Cairn’. “The whole collection effervesces with the astonishment, the absurdity, almost, of life, and the privilege of living through it.” Read the full review at: paperboats.org/cairn #bookreview