# City of Thorns (2016) by Ben Rawlence: nine lives in the Dadaab camps

> Ben Rawlence's City of Thorns (2016) on the Dadaab camps in Kenya: the nine Somali lives it follows, its main argument and how reviewers received it.

Source page: https://calankii.com/en/books/city-of-thorns-rawlence/
Last checked: 2026-11-12
Publisher: Calankii (https://calankii.com)

## The book

**City of Thorns: Nine Lives in the World's Largest Refugee Camp** is a non-fiction book by the British writer and former researcher **Ben Rawlence**, published by Picador in the UK in 2016 ([City of Thorns, Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_of_Thorns)).

## The place

The book is about **Dadaab**, a group of refugee camps in north-east Kenya near the Somali border. Dadaab was set up in 1992 for about 90,000 refugees from the Somali civil war; the book describes a population of hundreds of thousands, though the exact number has always been disputed ([Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_of_Thorns)). Life in the camps is covered on [Refugee camps](/en/diaspora/refugee-camps/).

## The people it follows

Rawlence tells the story of the camp through nine residents. Among them ([Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_of_Thorns)):

- **Guled**, who grew up in Mogadishu during the war, was taken by al-Shabaab and escaped.
- **Nisho**, born in 1991 as his parents fled Somalia, who grew up in the camp.
- **Muna**, a student who used the camp's free schools and pushed against the limits set for her.

## Its argument

The book's main claim is that "the quintessential refugee experience is not so much of movement as [of] being stuck": most refugees spend years or decades in camps near home rather than travelling on to Europe ([Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_of_Thorns)).

## How it was received

- The Guardian called it a "timely reminder that the vast majority of the world's refugee population will never see European shores" ([Wikipedia, citing The Guardian](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_of_Thorns)).
- In the New York Times, Caroline Moorehead described it as "a deeply disturbing and depressing portrait of the violence, destitution, fear, sense of hopelessness and neglect" in the camps ([Wikipedia, citing the New York Times](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_of_Thorns)).
- The Foreign Policy Association chose it for its 2019 "Great Decisions" programme on refugees and migration ([Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_of_Thorns)).

Other books on Dadaab include Cindy Horst's study [Transnational Nomads](/en/books/transnational-nomads-horst/) (2006), listed on [Books about Somalis, 1991 to 2005](/en/history/books-about-somalis-1991-2005/).

## Where to read it

- Lending copy: [Internet Archive](https://archive.org/details/cityofthornsnine0000rawl_e5z4)
- In a library: [WorldCat](https://search.worldcat.org/search?q=City+of+Thorns+Rawlence)

## Related pages

- [Refugee camps](/en/diaspora/refugee-camps/)
- [Kenya](/en/diaspora/kenya/)
- [Books about Somalis since 2006](/en/history/books-about-somalis-since-2006/)

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