The Good Deed reads like history that has been written over and over; perhaps it is just that the stories are as old as time, and displaced women and children—mute and damaged survivors—have been given voices. Benedict’s harrowing narrative highlights the ways in which hope and home are brutally wrenched from these refugees; the only profiteers are the people smugglers, who netted £183m out of misery last year alone.

The story follows four women, three refugees and an American, all of whom have washed up on the Greek island of Samos. The refugees’ stories unspool the banality of evil—rape, torture, murdered and disappeared children, ravaged families whose members casually betray one other and are slaughtered. Between sniping at her host, Kosmos, for his perceived racism, misogyny and pidgin English, the American, Hilma, hints darkly at a tragedy in her own past, the details of which inform her actions and are concealed until the last few pages.

The thread of entitled patriarchy versus the selflessness of maternal love weaves through every page. Nafisa, who has been raped and who lost all her children, and Leila, whose daughter and granddaughter were thrown off a smuggler’s boat at the last minute, are awaiting their future in a refugee camp. Early on, Nafisa and Leila lay out the novel’s central preoccupations:

‘Men all over the world are afraid of a mother’s curse,’ Nafisa says, leaning forward to brush a line of ants off her sandaled feet.

Leila scratches a swollen ankle. ‘It’s their own weakness men fear, nothing more.’

And yet, other than Kosmos and a peculiarly one-dimensional character named Sadek, none of the men seems especially afraid of anything. The smugglers steal, lie, and cheat their charges out of large sums of money, and either leave them to die or randomly shoot them. The situation is different for the women who, on their epic treks across Africa and the Middle East, must wear traditional modest clothing to avoid provoking the men’s sexual desire, forced to be guardians of the men’s weak morality. The ever-present threat of rape is only assuaged by the protectorate of an intimidating misogynist bully who ultimately turns on his ward, denies her identity, and calls her a child thief and a whore in a court of law. 

Enduring unimaginable hardship, the refugee women, Leila, Nafisa, and Amina, escape the horror wreaked by warring men in their homelands. They share food, water, stories, childcare, and heartbreak. Helpless in the face of smugglers and others who abuse them, they do anything they can to protect their children. Telling Amina her story of bringing up a child who was the progeny of her rape, and whose paternity she kept secret, Nafisa says, “This is what mothers do, little one. We lie to our children to protect them.”

Along the way, a child is lost, and it is this that brings the four women together, across the fences of the refugee camp, across worlds and cultures, where a woman’s love for a child needs no language, borders, or papers. 

Hilma, the American, embodies the worst type of go-gooder; her saviour complex is buoyed up by pots of money and an unassailable belief that her perspective is the only correct one. When she arrives at her Airbnb, she immediately labels her host a bigot and pillories him for the way he drives, dresses, and speaks English. In proper Greek tradition, Kosmos offers her food, ouzo, hospitality, companionship; he asks her to a movie. She calls his reference to the refugees arriving on the island “unfortunate,” and when he expresses concern at the crime that inevitably accompanies desperate poverty and the dispossessed, “I guffaw so obviously that I have to turn it into a cough.” Hilma is airily dismissive of Greek culture, though in a rare moment of levity she admires Pythagoras for his feminine even numbers and “spiky and phallic” odd ones. She claims she is “too culturally out of place” to be sure if Kosmos is flirting with her, yet is sure enough of her own culture to and to mock the friendship and kindness with which he tries to save her from herself.

Lacking in nuance and consumed by a private grief, Hilma attempts to buy a human life. And yet, at the height of the drama, when she has aroused hatred in the hearts of the three refugee women, it is hard not to feel a grudging admiration for her, as she is so clearly prepared to put her money where her mouth is. She retains a Greek lawyer, buys a lovely house near a good school, plans a future teaching the little girl whom she has rescued from the sea, and assimilating them both into a new culture. Kosmos’s son describes her: “Her name is Hilma Allen. She was once an artist. Now she’s trying to fuck up someone’s life.” 

Despite a Disney-esque last-minute courtroom scene, the stories of the four women leave loose ends and beg more questions, not least why in 2024 we still live in a world where, in some cultures, women remain chattels, slaves, and collateral in war games. The author optimistically includes a list of organisations aimed at helping refugees. Time will tell if this prompts her readers to take action or if these tales will keep being told, in one form or another, until the end of the world.

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Helen Benedict, a professor at Columbia University, has been writing about refugees and war for many years. She is the author of  Map of Hope & Sorrow: Stories of Refugees Trapped in Greece (2022) and The Lonely Soldier: The Private War of Women at War Serving in Iraq (2009). Her exposure of sexual predation in the military inspired the Oscar-nominated documentary, The Invisible War (2012), as well as a class action suit against the Pentagon on behalf of those sexually assaulted while serving. A recipient of the 2021 PEN Jean Stein Grant for Literary Oral History, the Ida B. Wells Award for Bravery in Journalism, and the James Aronson Award for Social Justice Journalism, Benedict is also the author of two novels, Wolf Season and Sand Queen. She lives in New York City.

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Educated in the West Indies, Saudi Arabia, Scotland and Belgium, Elizabeth Smith studied modern languages at Durham University in England. She reads anything she can, especially pre-war books by obscure women and modern European writers. She lives in an old house on a small island where she often pretends it is 1936.