Who Gets Believed?: When the Truth Isn't Enough

Description

The prizewinning author of The Ungrateful Refugee asks who is heard in our society, who is not - and why? 'I knew this from the beginning, when I was inside the lorry, thinking about truth. If you are a good storyteller you will be trusted, get a life, and escape from hell. But what do you need to do to be trusted, if telling the truth is not enough?' - Aso, a refugee working with Freedom from Torture Aso is one of many powerful voices in Dina Nayeri's wide-ranging, groundbreaking new book, which combines deep reportage with her own life experience to examine what constitutes believability. Intent on exploring ideas of persuasion and performance, Nayeri takes us behind the scenes in emergency rooms, corporate boardrooms, asylum interviews and into her own family, to ask - where lies the difference between being believed and being dismissed? What does this mean for our culture? As personal as it is profound in its reflections on language, history, morality and compassion, Who Gets Believed? investigates the unspoken social codes that determine how we relate to one another. 'I was hugely moved by this book. Who Gets Believed? is essential reading, an extraordinary labour of love and hope that is destined to become indispensable in the continuing struggle for justice' - John Burnside

Dina Nayeri is the author of two novels and a prize-winning book of creative non-fiction, The Ungrateful Refugee. A 2019-2020 Fellow at the Columbia Institute for Ideas and Imagination in Paris, and winner of the 2018 UNESCO City of Literature Paul Engle Prize, Dina has won a National Endowment for the Arts literature grant, the O. Henry Prize, and was selected for The Best American Short Stories, among other accolades. Her work has been published in more than twenty countries and in the New York Times, the Guardian, the New Yorker, Granta and many other publications. Dina has degrees from Princeton, Harvard and the Iowa Writers' Workshop. She was born in Iran and currently lives in Scotland, where she teaches at the University of St Andrews.

I was hugely moved by this book ... Essential reading, an extraordinary labor of love and hope that is destined to become indispensable in the continuing struggle for justice. -- John Burnside, author of A LIE ABOUT MY FATHER An important, courageous, brilliant book; an interrogation of "disbelief culture" and the injustice that both fuels it and is fuelled by it, a form-shifting memoir of an already-remarkable life, and a moving, harrowing investigation of love, loss and care. -- Robert Macfarlane, author of UNDERLAND Nayeri's mesmerizing, genre-bending book braids together narratives of asylum seekers, exonerated felons, and religious converts ... Heartbreaking and hopeful. Reading this book will upend your preconceptions about who is worthy of belief, as writing it did for Nayeri herself. -- Amanda Frost, author of YOU ARE NOT AMERICAN: CITIZENSHIP STRIPPING FROM DRED SCOTT TO THE DREAMERS A compelling, generous, and distinctive inquiry into the nature of belief, credibility, and, above all, the deeply unjust and unequal societies in which we live. -- Chitra Ramaswamy, author of HOMELANDS: THE HISTORY OF A FRIENDSHIP A profound, gorgeous, devastating book, exhilarating in both its compassion and its contemplation of pain ... Who Gets Believed? is that rarest of creations, an original work about a condition in which we are all implicated. -- Jeff Sharlet, bestselling author of THE FAMILY and THIS BRILLIANT DARKNESS A truly remarkable book, where universal and deeply personal themes are powerfully interwoven ... A masterclass in storytelling, teasing out the crucial implications of 'who gets believed' for all of us. -- Steve Crawshaw, policy director at Freedom from Torture and author of STREET SPIRIT: THE POWER OF PROTEST AND MISCHIEF