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A Map of Future Ruins: On Borders and Belonging Hardcover – February 13, 2024

by Lauren Markham (Author)
4.3 out of 5 stars 21 ratings
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“This stunning meditation on nostalgia, heritage, and compassion asks us to dismantle the stories we’ve been told—and told ourselves—in order to naturalize the forms of injustice we’ve come to understand as order.” —Leslie Jamison, author of The Empathy Exams
 
When and how did migration become a crime? Why does ancient Greece remain so important to the West’s idea of itself? How does nostalgia fuel the exclusion and demonization of migrants today?
     In 2021, Lauren Markham went to Greece, in search of her own Greek heritage and to cover the aftermath of a fire that burned down the largest refugee camp in Europe. Almost no one had wanted the camp—not activists, not the country’s growing neo-fascist movement, not even the government. But almost immediately, on scant evidence, six young Afghan refugees were arrested for the crime.
Markham soon saw that she was tracing a broader narrative, rooted not only in centuries of global history but also in myth. A mesmerizing, trailblazing synthesis of reporting, history, memoir, and essay, A Map of Future Ruins helps us see that the stories we tell about migration don’t just explain what happened. They are oracles: they predict the future.
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  1. Print length
    272 pages
  2. Language
    English
  3. Publisher
    Riverhead Books
  4. Publication date
    February 13, 2024
  5. Dimensions
    6.27 x 0.95 x 9.28 inches
  6. ISBN-10
    0593545575
  7. ISBN-13
    978-0593545577
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Editorial Reviews

Review

Praise for A Map of Future Ruins:

“What does it mean to belong? How is identity built, not just on an individual level but on a national or global scale? Lauren Markham explores these questions in a deeply personal and thoroughly reported story that weaves together her family lore with centuries of Greece’s history. . . . A Map of Future Ruins is a serious but dreamy read.”—NPR, 2024 "Books We Love"

“An expansive meditation on the roles of myth and politics in the stories we construct about our origins.” —New York Times

“Strange and intriguing. . . . Markham’s approach suggests that. . . . sometimes, rather than asking migrants to explain themselves, we, in the countries they are trying so desperately to reach, should be trying a little harder to explain ourselves.” —Washington Post

“A feat of reconstructive reportage, poetically written.”—The Atlantic

“Stunning. . . .  the most expansive contribution to border literature I have yet to read. . . . As projects go, it is the intellectual equivalent of a minefield—but Markham proves admiringly nimble on her Converse-clad feet.” —Los Angeles Review of Books

“[A] finely woven meditation on ‘belonging, exclusion, and whiteness.’” —The New Yorker

“A remarkable, unnerving, and cautionary portrait of a global immigration crisis.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred)

“Blends memoir, history, and reportage in a wide-ranging and unflinching account. . . . Into this heart-wrenching drama. . . . Markham interweaves ruminations on Greece’s twin crises of immigration and emigration. . . . Interspersed throughout are powerful ruminations on ancient Greece as the birthplace of classical Western ideals and the myth-making process inherent to all migration stories. Readers will be thoroughly engrossed.” —Publishers Weekly (starred)

“In this brilliant, timely meditation, Markham explores how the stories we tell about borders and who belongs can harden our hearts or help to open them. The threads she follows weave a tapestry as moving as it is illuminating.” —Rebecca Solnit, author of Hope in the Dark and A Field Guide to Getting Lost
 
“This stunning meditation on nostalgia, heritage, and compassion asks us to dismantle the stories we’ve been told—and told ourselves—in order to naturalize the forms of injustice we’ve come to understand as order.” —Leslie Jamison, author of The Empathy Exams

“A masterpiece of narrative journalism. A Map of Future Ruins is a story of two crises: the current refugee crisis affecting the Greek islands and the long-overlooked identity crisis within White America, whose preoccupation with ‘Western culture’ as an origin myth she traces both expansively and intimately.” —Aminatta Forna, author of Happiness and The Memory of Love
 
“Pushes beyond the news to interrogate the collective myths we tell ourselves about community, belonging, and the lives of immigrants.” —Jonathan Blitzer, author of Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here

“Luminous and expansive ... Markham shows us what we most urgently need to see.” —Ingrid Rojas Contreras, author of Fruit of the Drunken Tree and The Man Who Could Move Clouds

“Meticulous and exuberant, this is a journalist’s wayfinding journey to map a truthful account of the current refugee crisis.” –Thi Bui, author of The Best We Could Do
 
“A masterful, multilayered story by a writer with a sharp, questioning mind and a big heart.”  —Adam Hochschild, author of American Midnight and King Leopold’s Ghost

About the Author

Lauren Markham is the author of the award-winning The Far Away Brothers: Two Young Migrants and the Making of an American Life. She has been working with migrants for two decades and has written about migration and other social issues in The New York Times Magazine, The Guardian, The New York Review of Books, and other publications. She lives in Berkeley, CA.

Product details

  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Riverhead Books (February 13, 2024)
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 272 pages
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0593545575
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0593545577
  • Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 2.31 pounds
  • Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6.27 x 0.95 x 9.28 inches
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.3 out of 5 stars 21 ratings

About the author

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Lauren Markham

Lauren Markham

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Lauren Markham is a writer and reporter based in Northern California. A fiction writer, essayist and journalist, her work most often concerns issues related to youth, migration, the environment and her home state of California.

Markham is the author of The Far Away Brothers: Two Young Migrants and the Making of an American Life (Crown, September 2017). The Far Away Brothers was the winner of the 2018 Ridenhour Book Prize, the Northern California Book Award, and a California Book Award Silver Prize. It was named a Barnes & Noble Discover Selection, a New York Times Book Critics' Top Book of 2017, and was shortlisted for the J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize and the L.A. Times Book Award and longlisted for a Pen America Literary Award in Biography.

Her essays, fiction and journalism have appeared in outlets such as VQR (where she is aContributing Editor), Harper's, The Guardian, The New Republic, Guernica, VICE, Mother Jones, Orion, The Atlantic, Lithub, California Sunday, Narrative Magazine, Pacific Standard, and on This American Life. She has been awared fellowships from The Mesa Refuge, UC Berkeley, Middlebury College, the McGraw Center, the French American Foundation, and the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference.

In addition to writing, Markham works as a part time administrator at a high school for immigrant youth in Oakland, California and teaches writing at the Ashland University MFA in Writing Program, Left Margin Lit, and the University of San Francisco.

For updates, follow Lauren on Twitter: @LaurenMarkham_

Customer reviews

4.3 out of 5 stars
21 global ratings

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Top reviews from the United States

  • Anjelika Temple
    5.0 out of 5 stars Captivating and eye-opening, highly recommend
    Reviewed in the United States on May 22, 2024
    As a huge fan of Markham’s first book, The Faraway Brothers, I was thrilled to dive into A Map of Future Ruins as soon as possible. What I found was unexpected — part memoir, part philosophical speculation on myth throughout history, and top-notch reporting of an alarmingly unreported sequence of events on the island of Lesbos. Anything but dry, Markham’s way of conveying atmosphere and feeling in the midst of informative journalism is unlike anything I’ve ever read before.
    One person found this helpful
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  • Amazon Customer
    5.0 out of 5 stars Best book I’ve read this year
    Reviewed in the United States on May 7, 2024
    Beautiful, thought provoking and one of a kind- i don’t read a lot of non fiction but this book is so captivating. It weaves in history and contemporary politics with the author’s personal story so expertly and gives a fascinating perspective on why we think about immigration the way we do. Highly recommend!!
    3 people found this helpful
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