“Actually, I think southern Americans and Arabs have quite a lot in common – very hospitable, but deeply tied to culture and traditions. “It is a rewrite of the formation of the original US, so it didn’t seem so far-fetched to apply it to the Middle East. “It is a hopelessly optimistic view of the part of the world I came from,” says El Akkad with a laugh. After the fifth Arab Spring, the whole of North Africa and the Middle East has realigned into a single, peaceful and prosperous union. It also has a fascinating subplot in that the dominant global power, which has a vested interest in keeping America weak and divided, is a pan-Arab “Bouazizi Empire”. If the book functions as a warning, it is to say to people that America is not immune to the kind of suffering that it thinks happens in exotic wars far away.” “There’s a line in the book about the universal slogan of war: ‘If it had been you, you’d have done no different’. “What I set out to do was write a story about the universal nature of revenge and the extent to which any of us subjected to damage can become damaging ourselves. “People are already calling it a speculative dystopia, but I really had no interest in writing about the future,” he says. Part Hunger Games, part The Road, it is fully convincing.

His vivid protagonist, Sarat Chestnut, comes of age in refugee camps and becomes a war hero, freedom fighter and, eventually, shockingly vengeful. It tracks the life of a child from Louisiana who grows up in a shipping container in the midst of he civil war. 'I wanted to see how America would cope with it,' he says. These experiences led him to consider the possibility of the turmoil caused by the wars of the 21st century on the US. He now calls Portland, in Oregon, home, and has covered a wide range of stories – from Afghanistan to the Arab Spring and Guantanamo Bay – during his journalism career. El Akkad was born in Egypt, and grew up in Qatar and Canada.

“I totally forgot that I had it behind me as I was doing a video piece, with this massive note on it saying ‘area of plague’. “I sketched out what the country would look like and the settings of the book, and then I pasted this giant wall map of the US to my office wall with Post-it notes on it,” he says. This was, however, not the best idea for a journalist who is used to providing video content for his newspaper. It is 2075 and the country is in the throes of a second civil war, ignited when southern states refused to accede to a law banning fossil fuels.Īuthor Omar El Akkad had so many plates to spin in the piecing together of his ambitious debut novel, he had to sit down and draw a map of the new US to refer to. South Carolina is surrounded by a wall to prevent a virus from spreading. Rising sea levels have swept away the southern coast of the United States.

Omar el akkad