A LIFE REMOVED

A Life Removed attempts to bring the question of asylum back to the people who seek it rather than the political football it has become, it focus’ on refugees from around the world including the UK and the same questions they have to face. What is it like to have run from your life for more than ten years, and at the age of 65? Why do people flee and what are they fleeing from? Where do refugees go to first to find shelter?

Rose George travelled to West Africa to discover what really happens when you are uprooted by war, greed and guns, or - as Liberians would put it – when you’ve been "running, running, running" for 14 years non-stop. When you’ve rebuilt your house five times, and it’s been looted six times, so you don’t bother putting glass in the windows any more. When you carry your mobile phone in your underwear, so rebels don’t snatch it. When you’ve been a refugee so long, your camp has an internet café. When, like Francis Fladé Nemlin, you’re a highly-paid NGO worker one minute, and a refugee in a transit centre with 16 dependants, only two weeks later. "Anyone can become a refugee," Francis says, "Why not?".

Compelling, disturbing and a searing indictment of our failure to empathise,

A Life Removed is a unique and timely book that challenges the preconceptions of both sides of the political establishment, focusing on refugees from Africa to the UK

Rose George was born in 1969. She has written features for the Guardian Weekend,

The Sunday Telegraph, The Independent on Sunday and Arena. She has written on every thing from the Alternative World Cup in Bhutan, to Saddam Hussein’s birthday party in Baghdad. She lives in London. Puffin will also be publishing Making It Home: Real Life Stories of Children Forced to Flee, introduced by Beverley Naidoo on 4^th June 2004.

Proceeds from the sale of this book will go the International Rescue Committee (IRC).

For more information go towww.theirc.org.

0207 010 3254 / katherine.stroud@penguin.co.uk