In A Map of Future Ruins, journalist Lauren Markham (The Far Away Brothers) considers the global refugee crisis by focusing on one nation--Greece--and thoughtfully linking her investigation both to broader questions of identity and belonging, and to her own family's migration from that country more than a century ago.
Between 2019 and 2023, Markham made multiple trips to Greece to report on the plight of refugees seeking asylum in European nations that are becoming increasingly hostile to their arrival. Central to her story is the Moria refugee camp on the island of Lesbos. Built in 2013, it housed some 20,000 refugees at its height, but in 2020, it was destroyed in a massive fire. Among the six young immigrants charged with arson was Ali Sayed, a 14-year-old Afghan refugee who had fled first to Iran, hoping eventually to make his way to Germany. Markham follows his story, exposing the flaws in the investigation that led to his prosecution as an adult, despite his age.
Though she never strays far from these journalistic and historical paths, Markham makes clear that during her visits to Greece she also was eager to examine her own family's origin story. In 1914, her 16-year-old great-grandmother, Evanthia, left the island of Andros for Athens with her mother and younger brother, passing through Ellis Island after a month at sea before settling in New Haven, Conn.
Lauren Markham reveals in her fiercely honest book that the realities for displaced people in this world are both prosaic and perilous. --Harvey Freedenberg, freelance reviewer