The Optician of Lampedusa - Emma Jane Kirby

From the award-winning BBC journalist Emma-Jane Kirby, The Optician of Lampedusa crystallises the full horror of the migrant experience into one concise, stunningly-written volume.

Carmine Menna is an optician on the Italian island of Lampedusa. Like many on the island he has a boat, a yacht built for eight. A sailing holiday with friends is immediately transformed into a brutalised hell as the group awake to hundreds in the water around them, migrants overboard from an unseaworthy vessel. Forced to play god and saving who they can, ultimately 47 are plucked from the water, their own boat near to sinking with the additional weight.

360 were drowned.

For Menna, his life was irrevocably changed. He is, as he puts it, an ordinary man; no life-saver, nobody whose experience had ever led to this moment. For Kirby, the need to push this beyond a one-off news report was all-consuming. On a planet where human life is cut down with numbing ease, the raw humanity of the optician’s tale took hold in her subconscious; a good man, forced to act, righting a universal wrong.

The radio piece done, the narrative flowered in what was to become The Optician of Lampedusa, a profound volume that records the fear, the selfless bravery, the sorrow and the ultimate, fragmented redemption of a person who we hope we could be, faced by horror. Its sensitive but razor-edged verse reminds us that to do, we must act.