Content Warning: This Themes section contains references to distressing scenes (including the death of children), xenophobia, and post-traumatic stress disorder.

As a book about refugees, What Strange Paradise explores the reception those fleeing their homelands find in other countries. Its scrutiny reveals that reception is often deeply lacking—not merely hostile but hypocritical. Aboard the Calypso, Mohamed warns the migrants of this xenophobia, telling them that they will be discriminated against based on their skin color and Muslim faith. The migrants largely dismiss these warnings, but subsequent events prove Mohamed correct. Nevertheless, El Akkad holds out the possibility that those seeking refuge may find it among those marginalized within their own societies.

El Akkad’s choice of setting—a Greek island—emphasizes the hypocrisy of nativist attitudes toward refugees and other migrants. The Hotel Xenios is the central, orienting point in the geography of Vänna’s island in What Strange Paradise. The Calypso capsizes just offshore, and Amir and the other victims of the shipwreck wash up on the beach of the hotel’s resort grounds. El Akkad’s choice to name the hotel Xenios is ironic: The word xenios is the ancient Greek word for “stranger,” as well as the root of the word “xenophobia,” the fear and mistrust of strangers and foreigners.