GSWS Reads: Sonja Boon

In this special alumni edition of GSWS Reads, we invite you to join our virtual holiday book club where we will read Sonja Boon’s affecting memoir What the Oceans Remember: Searching For Belonging and Home. Sonja is SFU’s first PhD graduate in Women’s Studies. Born in the UK to a Surinamese mother and a Dutch father, Boon's family history spans Europe, Africa, Southeast Asia, South America, and North America. Written as an intimately personal memoir while informed by archival research across the oceans, What the Oceans Remember takes readers on a memorable journey in search of identity and belonging.

Writer Lisa Moore calls the book “breathtaking in scope,” and “elegant as silk, tough as steel.” Novelist Lydia Syson praises the author for succeeding “admirably in making silences speak and fragments cohere.” Scholar and journalist Minelle Mahtani says the book takes readers on “an extraordinary trip through continents and countries, and to cities and their archives, to help us understand how the stories of our ancestors tell us something about ourselves.”