My Fourth Time, We Drowned

Seeking Refuge on the World's Deadliest Migration Route

English language

Published Nov. 18, 2023 by Melville House Publishing.

ISBN:
9781685890575

View on OpenLibrary

5 stars (1 review)

6 editions

reviewed My Fourth Time, We Drowned by Sally Hayden

Impressive journalism written into a book that needs to be read.

5 stars

I’d consider myself as relatively well informed about the problems of borders, and the southern European one in particular. However, this book lays it bare, and it’s even worse than I understood.

The book is written from the journalistic first person. I’d like to call it ‘classic journalism’, maintaining ‘impartiality’. But not impartial as in not caring about those with absolutely no power. It cares, about people individually and as a group, but it’s only campaigning because doing so lights a fire under power. The book starts with the online contact being made from someone trapped in a Libyan prison. It then broadly follows Sally Hayden’s own experience of becoming one of the few, maybe only, journalists truly keeping in touch with migrants and their families, investigating the camps, NGOs and UN and reporting about the horrific situation that the EU is complicit in making. By writing it from this …