Reviews of A New Kind Of Wilderness, The Marching Band, Good One and Magic Farm by MARIA DUARTE, ANDY HEDGECOCK and MICHAL BONCZA
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‘Cruel watertight system’ a matter of life and death for migrants on the US-Mexico border
The US-Mexico border
SCOTT ALSWORTH foresees the coming of the smaller, leaner, and class conscious indie studio, with art as its guiding star
MARJORIE MAYO recommends an accessible and unsettling novel that uses a true incident of death in the Channel to raise questions of wider moral responsibility
MIK SABIERS wallows in a night of political punk and funk that fires both barrels at Trump
Reasonable radicalism, death in Abu Dhabi, locked-room romance, and sleuthing in the Blitz
SIMON DUFF recommends a new album from renowned composer and oud player Anour Brahem.
JAMES WALSH has a great night in the company of basketball players, quantum physicists and the exquisite timing of Rosie Jones
The Line Becomes a River
by Francisco Cantu
(Bodley Head, £14.99)
LAST year, an Amnesty International report revealed that an already dangerous journey for tens of thousands of refugees attempting to cross the Mexico-US border has become deadlier still as a result of Donald Trump’s executive order on border control and immigration.
According to Amnesty, the US is building a “cruel watertight system” to prevent people in need from receiving international protection and Mexico is all too willing to play the role of the US gatekeeper. That strategy ignores the fact that these are people with no other choice but to flee their homes if they want to survive, the report stressed.
Trump’s wall, his controversial orders and the ever-expanding immigration detention centres will not stop people from trying to enter the US. Instead, they will be forced to take deadly routes through the desert, by river and by sea. In this sick cat-and-mouse game, the only losers are the hundreds of thousands desperately fleeing deadly violence in the Central American countries of El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala and Mexico.
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