".determinedly humanistic and profoundly touching." -- Shelf Awareness starred review ".A strong, unsparing novel."-- Booklist "A masterful account of North Africans trying to sneak across the Straits of Gibraltar into Spain . A fine debut: richly atmospheric and evocative, at once a sharply narrated tale of suspense and a carefully constructed memoir of inner grief." -- Kirkus Reviews ".determinedly humanistic and profoundly touching.

" -- Shelf Awareness "From often bleak material, Mahi Binebine has writeen a moving novel that is full of life and light, aided by a fine translation from the French by Lulu Norman." -- The Independent "Binebine describes their plight in crisp elegant prose, which manages to convey compassion but avoids sentimentality." -- Camden Journal "Mahi Binebine is the first Moroccan writer to give these lives an identity." -- El Pais "Sober and unsentimental, Welcome to Paradise is a highly moving homage to the new wretched of the earth." -- Le Monde "Binebine writes with humanity.His is a rare voice, genuine, subtle and wry, even as it tells of private miseries and public suffering." -- Observer "At once sympathetic to a people's plight and angry with its self-delusions, this is a brave book to have written and a rich, unsettling one to read." -- Literary Review "I was profoundly moved by a beautiful, necessary Moroccan short novel, Welcome to Paradise .

exquisitely written and a perfect antidote to quasi-racist hysteria over asylum seekers." --Catherine Lockerbie, Scotsman "Why are illegal African emigrants so desperate to gatecrash Western Europe? The answers are explored in Mahi Binebine's terse, bleak compassionate Welcome to Paradise which is both topical and rare in tracing the phenomena to its roots: to the poverty and cruelty the emigrants are escaping." -- Financial Times "The suspense is compelling, and the novel's lyricism assails a dehumanising anonymity. There is a Sisyphean epic unfolding in the endless effort to reach paradise and the repetitive cycle of failure and defeat." -- Guardian.