This #FirstPageFriday is inspired by real events, and told through alternating perspectives. The reader can anticipate a morally complex story where life and death decisions are made.

“The Boat People [by Sharon Bala] is a high-stakes novel that offers a deeply compassionate lens through which to view the current refugee crisis.”

Summary: When a rusty cargo ship carrying Mahindan and five hundred fellow refugees from Sri Lanka’s bloody civil war reaches Vancouver’s shores, the young father thinks he and his six-year-old son can finally start a new life. Instead, the group is thrown into a detention processing center, with government officials and news headlines speculating that among the “boat people” are members of a separatist militant organization responsible for countless suicide attacks—and that these terrorists now pose a threat to Canada’s national security. As the refugees become subject to heavy interrogation, Mahindan begins to fear that a desperate act taken in Sri Lanka to fund their escape may now jeopardize his and his son’s chance for asylum.