A life removed - Rose George

Asylum-seeker'; refugee'. All the major British political parties have brought these words to the top of the political agenda. Some newspapers shout about the swarms' of refugees arriving on our shores; others criticise our government's lack of humanitarian principles. But what do we know about the refugees themselves what it means to leave your home, your family, your past?;Rose George has travelled to Liberia and Ivory Coast and also met refugees in Britain to discover what really happens when you are uprooted by war, greed and guns, or - as Liberians put it - when you've been 'running, running, running' for fourteen years non-stop; when you've rebuilt your house five times, and its been looted six times, so you don't bother putting glass in the windows any more; when, like Francis Flade Nemlin, you're a well paid NGO worker one minute, and a refugee in a transit centre with sixteen dependants only two weeks later. 'Anyone can become a refugee,' he says. 'Why not?';Challenging the preconceptions of both sides of the political establishment, A Life Removed is a searing indictment of our failure to empathize.