Who Gets Believed?

Who Gets Believed?

When the Truth Isn’t Enough

Summary

Brought to you by Penguin.

'I knew this from the beginning, when I was inside the lorry, thinking about truth. If you are a good storyteller you will be trusted, get a life, and escape from hell. But what do you need to do to be trusted, if telling the truth is not enough?' - Aso, a refugee working with Freedom from Torture


Aso is one of many powerful voices in Dina Nayeri's wide-ranging, groundbreaking new book, which combines deep reportage with her own life experience to examine what constitutes believability. Intent on exploring ideas of persuasion and performance, Nayeri takes us behind the scenes in emergency rooms, corporate boardrooms, asylum interviews and into her own family, to ask - where lies the difference between being believed and being dismissed? What does this mean for our culture?

As personal as it is profound in its reflections on language, history, morality and compassion, Who Gets Believed? investigates the unspoken social codes that determine how we relate to one another.

'I was hugely moved by this book. Who Gets Believed? is essential reading, an extraordinary labour of love and hope that is destined to become indispensable in the continuing struggle for justice' - John Burnside

©2023 Dina Nayeri (P)2023 Penguin Audio

Reviews

  • An elegant telling of truth to power... published at a poignant moment
    Observer

About the author

Dina Nayeri

Dina Nayeri is the author of two novels and a prize-winning book of creative non-fiction, The Ungrateful Refugee. A 2019-2020 Fellow at the Columbia Institute for Ideas and Imagination in Paris, and winner of the 2018 UNESCO City of Literature Paul Engle Prize, Dina has won a National Endowment for the Arts literature grant, the O. Henry Prize, and was selected for The Best American Short Stories, among other accolades. Her work has been published in more than twenty countries and in the New York Times, the Guardian, the New Yorker, Granta and many other publications. Dina has degrees from Princeton, Harvard and the Iowa Writers' Workshop. She was born in Iran and currently lives in Scotland, where she teaches at the University of St Andrews.
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