Boys Meet World

Omar El Akkad opens his second novel, What Strange Paradise, with a young boy lying face down on a shore littered with bodies and wreckage. With this image, El Akkad, the author of American War, sticks his finger in an open wound. In 2015, photos of the drowned body of the three-year-old Syrian refugee Alan Kurdi made headlines around the world after the small boat that carried his family capsized in the Mediterranean. In this fictionalized story, though, the child is not dead. His eyes open suddenly, and he dashes into the woods before the shocked relief workers roving the beach in haz‑mat suits can take him to the holding ­centre. El Akkad’s protagonist is not Alan Kurdi but Amir Utu, an eight-year-old boy from Homs, who has washed up on an unnamed island that resembles Crete.

It’s one thing to invoke the image of Alan Kurdi, quite another to resurrect him and cast...