Lauren Markham is the author of the award-winning The Far
Away Brothers: Two Young Migrants and the Making of an American
Life. She has been working with migrants for two decades and has
written about migration and other social issues in The New York
Times Magazine, The Guardian, The New York Review of Books, and
other publications. She lives in Berkeley, CA.
Praise for A Map of Future Ruins:
“What does it mean to belong? How is identity built, not just on an
individual level but on a national or global scale? Lauren Markham
explores these questions in a deeply personal and thoroughly
reported story that weaves together her family lore with centuries
of Greece’s history. . . . A Map of Future Ruins is a serious but
dreamy read.”—NPR, 2024 "Books We Love"
“An expansive meditation on the roles of myth and politics in the
stories we construct about our origins.” —New York Times
“Strange and intriguing. . . . Markham’s approach suggests that. .
. . sometimes, rather than asking migrants to explain themselves,
we, in the countries they are trying so desperately to reach,
should be trying a little harder to explain
ourselves.” —Washington Post
“A feat of reconstructive reportage, poetically written.”—The
Atlantic
“Stunning. . . . the most expansive contribution to border
literature I have yet to read. . . . As projects go, it is the
intellectual equivalent of a minefield—but Markham proves
admiringly nimble on her Converse-clad feet.” —Los Angeles Review
of Books
“[A] finely woven meditation on ‘belonging, exclusion, and
whiteness.’” —The New Yorker
“A remarkable, unnerving, and cautionary portrait of a global
immigration crisis.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred)
“Blends memoir, history, and reportage in a wide-ranging and
unflinching account. . . . Into this heart-wrenching drama. . . .
Markham interweaves ruminations on Greece’s twin crises of
immigration and emigration. . . . Interspersed throughout are
powerful ruminations on ancient Greece as the birthplace of
classical Western ideals and the myth-making process inherent to
all migration stories. Readers will be thoroughly
engrossed.” —Publishers Weekly (starred)
“In this brilliant, timely meditation, Markham explores how the
stories we tell about borders and who belongs can harden our hearts
or help to open them. The threads she follows weave a tapestry
as moving as it is illuminating.” —Rebecca Solnit, author of Hope
in the Dark and A Field Guide to Getting Lost
“This stunning meditation on nostalgia, heritage, and compassion
asks us to dismantle the stories we’ve been told—and told
ourselves—in order to naturalize the forms of injustice we’ve come
to understand as order.” —Leslie Jamison, author of The Empathy
Exams
“A masterpiece of narrative journalism. A Map of Future Ruins is a
story of two crises: the current refugee crisis affecting the
Greek islands and the long-overlooked identity crisis within White
America, whose preoccupation with ‘Western culture’ as an origin
myth she traces both expansively and intimately.” —Aminatta Forna,
author of Happiness and The Memory of Love
“Pushes beyond the news to interrogate the collective myths we tell
ourselves about community, belonging, and the lives of immigrants.”
—Jonathan Blitzer, author of Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here
“Luminous and expansive ... Markham shows us what we most urgently
need to see.” —Ingrid Rojas Contreras, author of Fruit of the
Drunken Tree and The Man Who Could Move Clouds
“Meticulous and exuberant, this is a journalist’s wayfinding
journey to map a truthful account of the current refugee crisis.”
–Thi Bui, author of The Best We Could Do
“A masterful, multilayered story by a writer with a sharp,
questioning mind and a big heart.” —Adam Hochschild, author
of American Midnight and King Leopold’s Ghost
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