AustLit

'I sit on a bar stool in an Oxford pub and listen to my friend Neil describe in great detail the things that he has, only a few days ago, witnessed in Bosnia, in the main streets, the tiny lanes of an impossibly small village. Around each corner and on many rooftops there are snipers. Those who were once neighbours take pot shots at closed doors. Young boys who grew up together, went to the one village school together, are now trying to kill each other. Old women who each morning for the past fifty years had drunk thick, black coffee together no longer speak to each other, one grand - son having raped the other's daughter. Neil goes on to number off how many body bags he had seen carted out through the mud of the village.' 

 (Publication abstract)

'Among the many fates Behrouz Boochani has suffered is that the importance of his political struggle has obscured his achievement in making literary art out of the situation he finds himself in. Boochani’s insistence that people read No Friend But the Mountains as art is grounded in his sense that it is only via literary language that people can understand the lives and conditions of those held on Manus Island.' (Introduction)