Dina Nayeri - Who Gets Believed?: When the Truth Isnt Enough

SELECTED PRAISE FOR

Dina Nayeri

Who Gets Believed?

Who Gets Believed? is an important, courageous, brilliant book; an interrogation of disbelief culture and the injustice that both fuels it and is fueled by it, a form-shifting memoir of an already remarkable life, and a moving, harrowing investigation of love, loss, and care.

Robert Macfarlane, author of Underland

A profound, gorgeous, devastating book, exhilarating in both its compassion and its contemplation of pain. Part memoir, part everythingreportage, criticism, history, meditationthis is a book about the many translations of grief, suffering, and hope. It is also about performance and truth, staged necessarily and most urgently by refugees seeking asylum, and seeking the belief of others. Who Gets Believed? is that rarest of creations, an original work about a condition in which we are all implicated.

Jeff Sharlet, bestselling author of The Family and This Brilliant Darkness

A compelling, generous, and distinctive inquiry into the nature of belief, credibility, and, above all, the deeply unjust and unequal societies in which we live. Reading it I was reminded of Joan Didions famous and oft-misconstrued observation that we tell ourselves stories in order to live. Who Gets Believed? shows the workings of Nayeris singular and noble mind.

Chitra Ramaswamy, author of Homelands: The History of a Friendship

I was hugely moved by this book... To bear witness, to tell my own story in my own words, is a basic human right. And yet as Dina Nayeris powerful, often harrowing, but ultimately inspiring account of injustice and survival shows, millions are denied that right on an almost casual basis. Who Gets Believed? is essential reading, an extraordinary labor of love and hope that is destined to become indispensable in the continuing struggle for justice, a day when everyone has the basic right to speak the truth openly and to have their testimony heard.

John Burnside, author of A Lie about My Father

Dina Nayeris mesmerizing, genre-bending book braids together narratives of asylum seekers, exonerated felons, and religious converts to ask: Who Gets Believed? In an era of fake news and tribalism, her question is urgent. In lyrical prose, Nayeri dives into court cases, draws from history and literature, and shares her own familys journey as refugees from Iran. The result is both heartbreaking and hopeful. Reading this book will upend your preconceptions about who is worthy of belief, as writing it did for Nayeri herself.

Amanda Frost, author You Are Not American: Citizenship Stripping from Dred Scott to the Dreamers

A truly remarkable book, where universal and deeply personal themes are powerfully interwoven. Torture survivors and other refugees know all too well the cost of being disbelieved about their own life story. Dina Nayeris book is itself a masterclass in storytelling, teasing out the crucial implications of who gets believed for all of us.

Steve Crawshaw, policy director at Freedom from Torture and author of Street Spirit: The Power of Protest and Mischief

The Ungrateful Refugee

Finalist for the 2019 Kirkus Prize in Nonfiction

Finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize

Winner of the Geschwister-Scholl-Preis in Germany

Finalist for the Elle Grand Prix des Lectrices in France

Nayeri, the author of two novels including Refuge, uses her first work of nonfiction to remind readers of the pain and horrors refugees face before and long after their settlement. It is timely, as President Trump has made barring refugees from the United States a priority, and the Western world is plagued with a surge in nativism. Nayeri combines her own experience with those of refugees she meets as an adult, telling their stories with tenderness and reverence.

Nazila Fathi, The New York Times Book Review

Topical and urgent.

Maura M. Lynch and Jinnie Lee, W magazine

A storyteller who invites our moral engagement.

BookPage

Dina Nayeris The Ungrateful Refugee is a work of astonishing, insistent importance.

The Guardian

A gifted weaver of stories... Dina Nayeris book is one of those that must be read by all who care about the survival of human solidarity.

The Irish Times

The Ungrateful Refugee is glorious and beautifully written. The emotion is palpable off the page. I couldnt put it down. I found so much that was not only moving but relatable on a very deep level.

Padma Lakshmi

In spare and delightfully direct prose, Nayeri interrogates how and why we allow ourselves to demand proof of fear and gratitude from those seeking the most basic human dignity... Im haunted by the question she threads carefully underneath all the others: What keeps us from believing in each other?

Mira Jacob, author of Good Talk

Unflinching, complex, provocative, and important.

Nikesh Shukla, editor of The Good Immigrant

Dina Nayeri has written a vital book for our times... Written with compassion, tenderness, and a burning anger, her book appears at the end of a decade in which division and dislocation have risen to a terrible pitch. It speaks powerfully fromand tothe heart. Please read it.

Robert Macfarlane, author of Underland

Refuge

A New York Times Editors Choice

Nayeris exploration of the exiles predicament is tender and urgent.

The New Yorker

Rich and colorful, bolts of words prettily unfurling... The kind of immediacy commonly associated with memoir, which lends it heft, intimacy, atmosphere.

Jennifer Senior, The New York Times

Dina Nayeri is a writer to watch.

Azarin Sadegh, Los Angeles Review of Books

Difficult to put down... Stunning.

Mariam Ansar, BuzzFeed

Nayeri uses gentle humor and evocative prose to illuminate the power of familial bonds and to bestow individuality on those anonymous people caught between love of country and need for refuge... Beautiful.

Library Journal (starred review)

Richly imagined and frequently moving... Poignant, wise, and often funny.

Kirkus Reviews

Nayeris prose sings while moving nimbly with equal parts seriousness and humor.

Publishers Weekly

Dina Nayeris prose has something all too rare in books these days: a wild, beating heart.

Boris Fishman

ALSO BY DINA NAYERI

The Waiting Place: When Home Is Lost and a New One Not Yet Found

The Ungrateful Refugee: What Immigrants Never Tell You

Refuge: A Novel

A Teaspoon of Earth and Sea

For Sam who loves strange stories and for Elena who always believes them.
And for Maman Moti, my enigmatic London grandmother, for whom I was ready to believe anything. Rest in peace, defiance, and power.

The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

W. B. YEATS, FROM THE SECOND COMING

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