Laura Jansen We Saw a Light: Reports From Lesbos

‘Freedom isn’t something that I understand, not really. I see it when my passport and papers let me fly and ride. I see it when, at the end of the day, I leave the camp through the gate, on my way to my own house. But freedom is nothing that I have ever lost. I only know that I have it, and that they don’t.’

After an intensive world tour as a singer-songwriter, Laura Jansen comes home to Amsterdam exhausted and with a broken heart. When she hears about refugees arriving at Central Station, she decides to do something. It is 2015 and the refugee crisis is at its peak. She spends evening after evening at the station with others, welcoming and assisting the exhausted and desperate arrivals. Their stories touch her deeply and sketch a clearer and clearer picture of the humanitarian disaster taking place only a few-hour’s flight away. She decides to go to Lesbos for ten days, and stays on the island for two and a half years, devoting her heart and soul to the refugees on the coast and in the camps. Only when she returns home do the aftereffects hit her. Nothing seems to be same.

We Saw a Light is a deeply personal and gripping story in which innocent men, women and children are given a face. A book as piercing as it is hopeful, about vigour and humanity.

World rights: Thomas Rap – Non-fiction – 352 pages – May 2021