DAVIES: You would need a lot of money, both just for traveling and living expenses and to pay smugglers, who are not cheap. Where did the money come from? How did you hide it?

The queues have agency and they establish something: any person in the prison who behaves in a more despicable and brutish manner has a more comfortable lifestyle." (p. 183) DAVIES: So this Norwegian vessel encounters you. You do make it to Lesbos. You were arrested, as you expected to be; people will get arrested and apply for asylum and hope to continue their journey. And so you end up in this camp called Moria. Tell us what the conditions were like, what the experience was.

AIKINS: Well, the money came from the book advance. And there's a system for transferring money that Afghans use. It's called Hawala or saraf. And so you can actually just leave all your money with your mother in Kabul, and then she can go to money changers and have it sent to various spots along the route. And it's one of these many ingenious systems that migrants use that we discovered in the course of this book. In this extraordinary book, an acclaimed young war reporter chronicles a dangerous journey on the smuggler's road to Europe, accompanying his friend, an Afghan refugee, in search of a better future.

DAVIES: What was that like, I mean, a country in chaos? How did you decide what to do? Did it - did you feel a lot of pressure? AIKINS: I thought maybe we'd all go in the water, and if we did, people are going to die. You know, I'm a strong swimmer. I've grown up on the ocean. Many of the people there, they had never seen the ocean before; this is Omar's first time in a boat. So I just knew that things were going to get really bad if we capsized. The naked don’t fear the water, is a recall of the hardships and the story of immigrants. At its core it’s about love, pain and most of hope. I adored How each person in this biographical memoir is faced with their own unique set of challenges, yet they are somehow intertwined with one another. I couldn’t help but find myself impressed by the extensive information and research presented by the author throughout this novel. AIKINS: Yeah, Jim and I lived on a street that had formerly been guarded by the police, and now there was Taliban outside our house. And, you know, we kind of got to know them, and they didn't give us any trouble. But it was a little bit sketchy, and the city changed. You know, it was a ghost town as soon as sunset came around. There is much to admire about this book, its first-hand perspective being the most obvious. When Aikins writes of the ‘sense of vertigo in handing yourself over to criminals’ it’s because he himself has been in their clutches. This isn’t a reconstructed account, pasted together from secondhand sources; it is embedded journalism in the raw, a personal dispatch from behind the lines of Europe’s intractable migrant crisis.’But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in. Some reporters can’t help telling you their latest tale of derring-do: “I was there. And it was hell!” I’d infrequently run into Aikins somewhere, but the Canadian journalist would never say much about what he had just done or where he was headed. Then my next issue of Harper’s would arrive, and I’d see “ On the Front Lines in the World’s Deadliest Megacity” above his name. Personally, I’m certain their is aspects of this that every person of colour can relate to. Particularly, how society views POC and especially those who are immigrants. Above all else, it shows that the refugees like Omar and his family are brave, they are determined, and they are all hopeful. They deserve the opportunity to have a safe life. The Naked Don’t Fear the Water is a work of great empathy and humanity: a must-read for anyone looking to understand our increasingly fractured age.’