The Refugee Ocean

By: Pauls Toutonghi

Narrated by: Ali Andre Ali, Suehyla El-Attar Young, Jackie Sanders

Two refugees find that their lives are inextricably linked—over time and distance—by the perils of history and a single haunting piece of music in this “breathtaking and simultaneously heartbreaking” (The Montecito Journal) story.

Born in Beirut in 1922, Marguerite Toutounghi lives a life of loss and sacrifice. She dreams of traveling Europe and studying music at the Conservatoire de Paris but her family—and her society—hold her back. When she meets the son of a Cuban tobacco farmer at a formal dance, love transforms her life. Together with him, she flees across the Atlantic Ocean. She’s hoping for a new beginning, she finds revolution and chaos.

Over fifty years later, Naïm Rahil is a teenage refugee from Aleppo, Syria. A former piano prodigy who struggles to thrive in America—and who has lost part of his hand in the war—he dreams of a simple normal life.

Moving from Aleppo on the brink of civil war, to Lebanon in the late 1940s, to Havana during the Cuban Revolution, to the suburbs of Washington, DC, The Refugee Ocean “is an exquisite…poignant, and layered novel” (Eleanor Shearer, author of River Sing Me Home) that grapples with what it means to be an immigrant, shows how wounds can heal, and highlights the role of music and art in the resilience of the human spirit.

Critic reviews

"Three extraordinary narrators guide listeners through two timelines, three lives, and multiple locations involving the immigrant experience. Marguerite, intelligently portrayed by Suehyla El-Attar Young, is musically gifted and composes brilliant sonatas even as civil war rages in Beirut in 1922. Ali Andre Ali is terrific while recounting a story set 50 years later involving Naim, a young Syrian and gifted pianist who is maimed in an Aleppo bombing. Tying the two stories together is wise, witty American Annabel, who is wonderfully portrayed by Jackie Sanders. From Lebanon to Cuba, from Syria to America, the sensitive prose offers painful insights into war and its effects on those displaced. But it’s the top-notch performances and music that will resonate with listeners."

Absolutely stunning

I loved how Pauls weaved the story across history. I am so glad I read it.

Good moments, especially for music lovers—but storytelling lapses

This book starts off so well. We meet two piano-loving protagonists: one a Lebanese woman at midcentury; another a Syrian refugee in the 2010s. We know their stories must meet, but how? After so much development of young Marguerite’s inner life, the second half of the book does her an injustice by rushing to the end of her melodramatic storyline. The characterization of Annabel, a pivotal figure in the second half, is also rushed and unsatisfying (why, again, is she so devoted to refugees; how does she suddenly understand so much Spanish?). The episode in 1958 Cuba is unconvincing—it feels lifted from a right-wing telenovela—and it doesn’t help that the voice actors can’t pronounce Spanish words and put on comically stereotypical accents. Naim and Fatima are well drawn, but there’s no transcendent insight to be drawn from the way their lives link back to Marguerite’s. It feels like two partial novels unsatisfactorily pieced together.