Book review: My Fourth Time, We Drowned – Sally Hayden reveals the shocking truth of a human rights disaster on Europe’s doorstep

Award-winning journalist draws our attention to the horrific abuses of migrants trying to make their way to the Mediterranean while Europe turns a blind eye

African migrants in the Libyan capital Tripoli after being rescued by the country’s coast guard in June 2018. Picture: Getty

The award-winning Irish journalist Sally Hayden has spent most of her career reporting on the Mediterranean refugee crisis for outlets as diverse as Vice and Al Jazeera (she’s currently the Irish Times’s Africa correspondent). My Fourth Time, We Drowned is her devastating account of what has happened to thousands of persecuted human beings who left their home countries in search of a better life.

The book begins in August 2018, when Hayden received a Facebook ...