Set in the future when the waters have risen, The Morningside shows us a world that could be ours. Not too far away to be unbelievable and not so dystopian that it is scary, but just far enough away for us to realise that something catastrophic has happened whilst the world is still recognisable. The rubbish is collected, people still have cars and electricity but there is mass migration. Sound familiar?

Silvia and her mother move to an island city as part of a ‘Repopulation Program’ that provides refugees an opportunity to settle in towns and cities where presumably those with money have moved out to safer ground. Silvia and her mother move in with Aunt Ena who lives in the city with a view of ‘Back Home’ as a wonderful place, farmland and abundance of food. Silvia’s mother has, however, a completely different view about the past and forbids Silvia to ever mention the language they used to speak or where she was from. It is impossible to know which side of the war other people were on and she would rather not think about it or talk about it.

So here we have two characters who must represent refugees the world over: forget the past or live with a romanticised view of the past where everything was wonderful.

As the story unfolds we find Silvia with rituals to keep her mother safe, hiding three objects around the block of flats that they maintain as work and the counting of them, one, two three almost as a spell to keep their magic alive. But living on the top floor, Ena tells Silvia, is a woman, Bezia Duras, with three dogs who never needs maintenance help and whose dogs turn into men at night. This introduces us to the idea of a Vila, a powerful and beautiful spirit, and with Silvia determined to find out more about Duras and therefore herself, into the central theme of the book.

This magical realism, or is it mythological realism, is beautifully described in parts but especially where Silvia and her companion, Mila, follow Duras and her dogs to find out where they go.

Here, in this vacant spread of the upper city, the train left its ivy-laden tunnel and shot northward across the edge of the park and out into the north bay. Junction girders that had once held the old trains aloft had created a kind of aboveground cavern, metal arches spanning away and away. The tide was here, too. It had come up Green Street and settled between the pylons, singing quietly against everything, even the tips of our shoes.

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There are many links with Obreht’s own experiences as a refugee fleeing from Srebenica including towards the end of the novel meeting a man who was responsible for the atrocities during the war but who was in hiding on their island. A meeting between Silvia’s mother and this man leads them to run again, but this time they have help from a friend of Silvia’s who runs a local radio station that listens to the stories of the people and broadcasts them live.

This is a novel that shows us the importance of story telling, both of the past and the future, the lives of refugees and the harshness of survival and invokes an epic Serbian poem, The Building of Skadar. We are also asked to consider the loss that refugees suffer and the effort it takes to build a new life alongside a child’s way of seeing the world and the sense they make of it.