Breach
OLUMIDE POPOOLA & ANNIE HOLMES

Can fiction mend the world? Clearly that is the view of Peirene, hitherto acclaimed publishers of translated contemporary European fiction, now making a bold transition into fiction written in English with a new series Peirene Now!

Any anxiety about a too-programmatic venture – two writers commissioned to visit the now dismantled refugee camp known as the Jungle in Calais and come back with imaginative fiction – quickly vanishes as the eight stories in this collection, four by each hand, unfold fluently.

There have been other attempts to describe the Jungle, such as Marie-Françoise Colombani and Damien Roudeau’s Bienvenue à Calais (Actes Sud) last year, with its vivid pictures of the camp, but in these stories fiction takes the place of reportage. The depths of insight and empathy they sound fully vindicates Peirene’s decision to explore the realities of the refugee experience in this way. Fiction can enter sympathetically the consciousness and experiences of others, making us feel not just the texture and smell of the place, but the tensions, conflicts and anxieties of the experience of being in the Jungle. And there is humour too.