Open Your Eyes
The Invisible Crowd by Ellen Wiles is a powerful contemporary novel surrounding the topic of seeking asylum. It is an intense read and one that will horrify you, break your heart, and cause you to realise that people the world over want the same thing – someone to love them and a place to call home. I would like to say that I enjoyed the novel but that sounds flippant in light of the subject matter. So I will say that it was a powerful read that totally consumed me, held my attention, invaded my life and I could not put it down.
The novel uses the microcosm of focusing in on one man – Yonas from Eritrea – to represent a macrocosm of unknown faces. We see the world from his point of view. He interacts with others. There are chapters written from others points of view. We see the impact Yonas has on lives around him.