num_pages: 352
description: 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 attacksand 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. Told through the alternating perspectives of Mahindan; his lawyer Priya a second-generation Sri Lankan Canadian who reluctantly represents the refugees; and Grace a third-generation Japanese Canadian adjudicator who must decide Mahindan's fate as evidence mounts against him The Boat People is a spellbinding and timely novel that provokes a deeply compassionate lens through which to view the current refugee crisis.
language: English
title: The Boat People
publisher: Doubleday