MONDAY’S STORY

City of Thorns tells an epic love story gone wrong between Monday, a Christian and a former lost boy from Sudan, and Muna, a Somali beauty who grew up in the camp and had already been widowed and divorced by the time she turned 18. Muna is so schooled in the liberal ideals of the NGOs that run the camp that she rebels by marrying Monday, knowing his religion will anger her clan. Indeed, her relatives attack Monday while local Somali nurses plot to lethally inject their baby in the delivery room. The couple is forced to take refuge in a special transit area of the camp for at-risk refugees. They would still be there today, hiding from Muna’s vengeful relatives, were it not for the author’s intervention. “I eventually found out that their file for resettlement in Australia had been lost for three years,” Ben Rawlence said. “But if I hadn’t been there, they would have been left to rot.”