Khaled Hosseini’s New Book Deals With Refugee Crisis

Riverhead Books, a division of the American Publisher Penguin Group based in New York, has acquired Afghan-American author Khaled Hosseini’s new book ‘Sea Prayer’ which is the novelist’s response to the refugee crisis.

Featuring illustrations by London-based artist Dan Williams, the book was inspired by the haunting image of young Alan Kurdi, the three-year-old Syrian boy whose body washed up on the beach in Turkey in September 2015.

‘Sea Prayer’ will be released on September 18, to mark the third anniversary of Kurdi’s death, Publishersweekly.com wrote.

Written in the form of a letter, Sea Prayer is a father’s reflection as he watches over his sleeping son, on the dangerous journey across the sea that lies before them. It is also an account of their life in Homs, Syria, before the war, and of that city’s swift transformation from a home into a deadly war zone.

The book will be published simultaneously by Penguin Canada and Bloomsbury in the UK.

“We are living in the midst of a displacement crisis of enormous proportions,” Hosseini said in a statement. “Sea Prayer is an attempt to pay tribute to the millions of families, like Alan Kurdi’s, who have been splintered and forced from home by war and persecution.”

Hosseini will donate author proceeds from the book to the United Nations Refugee Agency and his own Khaled Hosseini Foundation to send funds to help refugees.

Hosseini is an internationally best-selling author who rose to prominence with his first novel ‘Kite Runner’, published in 2003 by Riverhead Books. The title was about the life of an Afghan boy living in Kabul and its story was set against a backdrop of tumultuous events, from the fall of Afghanistan’s monarchy through the Soviet military intervention, the exodus of refugees to Pakistan and the US, and the rise of the Taliban regime.