AIKINS: Well, I was trying to leave choices up to Omar 'cause it was his trip, after all, and not mine. And there was a few options. You could try to go through the mountains of Bulgaria or cross over land to Greece, but he thought the best idea was still to go to the Greek islands. The problem was now the islands were kind of like prisons and you couldn't leave them but figured there'd be some way with smugglers. And so that's what we did. That's how we ended up in the little boats. Aikins offers a kaleidoscopic view of fragmented families and dispossessed people trying and failing and scheming and planning and hoping and praying to complete the next leg of their journey... Unique, gripping, and beautifully written.’ AIKINS: Well, it was the Taliban who were going to kidnap you beforehand a lot of times. And now that they were the government and supposedly claimed to want to protect foreign journalists and NGO workers because they wanted to portray themselves as a responsible authority, there was actually less threat of kidnapping in the beginning, at least. We were more worried about ISIS, who might want to kill a foreigner, or just being in the wrong place at the wrong time. There was a lot of shooting around the airport. DAVIES: You would need a lot of money, both just for traveling and living expenses and to pay smugglers, who are not cheap. Where did the money come from? How did you hide it?

AIKINS: Well, he sent us to the exact place that we had asked not to go to. He lied through his teeth to us, which is unfortunately a very common experience dealing with these people.DAVIES: Yeah, you said a million people reached Europe by sea during this movement, the largest movement of refugees across waters in history. By the time Omar decided he was going to go, he had some personal considerations that delayed him. Things had changed. How did they change? DAVIES: He said, this is not what we paid for. And he saw a weapon and said, you're going now. So that's - you got into this little boat.

The Naked Don’t Fear the Water is a work of great empathy and humanity: a must-read for anyone looking to understand our increasingly fractured age.’ DAVIES: Yeah. He eventually - he doesn't end up in Greece. He's not still there, right? He's made it to safety? The book shines a humane spotlight on many of the people the author met along the way as well as on the role chance played in their fates, with particularly moving chapters on life within the Greek refugee camp. The narrative is scrupulous and often suspenseful. Sharp insider insights into a global dilemma.’DAVIES: So you made it clear to the smuggler that you didn't want to go there, and the smuggler that you connected with said, no, you're not going there. But as you say in the book, you put yourself in the hands of criminals. What actually happened then when you paid the smuggler and went down to the shoreline of Turkey to try and get to Greece? AIKINS: I thought maybe we'd all go in the water, and if we did, people are going to die. You know, I'm a strong swimmer. I've grown up on the ocean. Many of the people there, they had never seen the ocean before; this is Omar's first time in a boat. So I just knew that things were going to get really bad if we capsized.