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Product Description “Our government jailed his body, but his soul remained that of a free man.” ― From the Foreword by Man Booker Prize–winning author Richard Flanagan In 2013, Kurdish-Iranian journalist Behrouz Boochani was illegally detained on Manus Island, a refugee detention centre off the coast of Australia. He has been there ever since. This book is the result. Laboriously tapped out on a mobile phone and translated from the Farsi. It is a voice of witness, an act of survival. A lyric first-hand account. A cry of resistance. A vivid portrait of five years of incarceration and exile. Winner of the Victorian Premier’s Prize for Literature, Australia’s richest literary prize, No Friend But the Mountains is an extraordinary account ― one that is disturbingly representative of the experience of the many stateless and imprisoned refugees and migrants around the world. Review PRAISE FOR BEHROUZ BOOCHANI AND NO FRIEND BUT THE MOUNTAINS: A New Statesman Book of the Year "[No Friend but the Mountains] is a stunning and devastating account of life on remote Manus Island, where Behrouz, a Kurdish-Iranian journalist seeking asylum, has been held illegally by the Australian government for six years. The writing is an astonishing mix of dreamlike poetry and piercingly political and psychological insight. I can't remember reading anything recently that has seized me like this or taken me into the heart of the barbaric treatment of those criminalized and brutalized in their search for safety and care." - Eve Ensler, author of The Apology, special to the New York Times Book Review "First-person narratives that paint historical events from the perspective of the persecuted have proven powerful and enduring. These stories are subversive; the images slip into a reader's mind and create empathy where there was little before. They can permanently alter the way history is recorded and understood. Boochani's book challenges readers to acknowledge that we are living in the age of camps." - New York Times Magazine "No Friend but the Mountains by Behrouz Boochani will always belong to the canon of literature written under great duress and courage. This unique book should be read by all who care about the stories of our time. No Friend but the Mountains reminds us that no matter how different we may be from one another, whether it's the colour of our skin, the god we pray to, where we are born, or where we call home, that we have words, language, and literature in common. I celebrate the courage of Boochani, who has pursued this ideal, this love of writing, and the faith in words as a tool to inform, to be a doorway to new and unexpected worlds, challenge tyrannies, and seek justice." - Jennifer Clement, author of Gun Love and President of PEN International "Under atrocious conditions [Behrouz Boochani] has managed to write and publish a record of his experiences (experiences yet to be concluded), a record that will certainly leave his jailers gnashing their teeth … No Friend but the Mountains provides a wholly engrossing account of the first four years that Boochani spent on Manus, up to the time when the prison camp was closed and the prisoners resettled elsewhere on the island. Just as absorbing is his analysis of the system that reigns in the camp, a system imposed by the Australian authorities but autonomous in the sense that it holds the jailers as well as the prisoners in its grip … [No Friend but the Mountains is] the absorbing record of a life-transforming episode whose effects on his inner self the writer is still trying to plumb." - J. M. Coetzee, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, special to the New York Review of Books "No Friend but the Mountains deserves a place beside some of the world's most famous prison narratives and testaments about living in a time of genocide, slavery, and state-sponsored oppression. It brings to mind various literary siblings: the ways in which The Diary of Anne Frank sketched the life of a y