The term refugee sounds heavy with baggage. The world is now reportedly experiencing the largest flow of refugees since World War II.

Journalist Ben Rawlence, in his new non-fiction book City of Thorns, set in Daadab, which is the largest refugee camp in the world and is situated in northern Kenya, does not look at refugees as mere numbers or indulge us with images of destitute people fleeing from war and hunger.

Instead, in the place of faceless hundreds of displaced people queuing at a border point, Rawlence takes us on an intimate journey into the lives of a few residents of Daadab refugee camp and their families. City of Thorns tells us their stories through the subjects’ own eyes.

We encounter unforgettable characters. There is Isha, a strong-willed leader from Rebay, who was reluctant to leave her home because she felt a connection with the red soil. She braved the famine and scorching sun to teach the pastoralists how to read and write. She did not want to make the long journey even when faced with the possibility of starvation.

We also meet Guled, yanked from his desk at a primary school classroom by the Al Shabaab militia because he was big enough to fight. There is also Nisho, born and raised in the camp; he harbours dreams of going “home” to Somalia. After his first visit to Mogadishu, Nisho realised the futility of dreaming of another home. On returning to the camp, he accepted that “Ifo felt like home.”

Rawlence focuses on the humanity of the characters, and succeeds in getting us to lower our guard and cast aside our stereotypes. We see the refugees as fellow humans who experience emotional turmoil and family feuds just as we do. They hold on to their dreams of better lives even as they remain trapped within a camp that was meant to be a temporary refuge.

They are not allowed to go into “Kenya,” yet returning home to face the militia in war-ravaged Somalia isn’t an appealing option. With limited choices, they build their hopes on football, and dreams of scholarships abroad and winning the lottery. Their challenges include clan and religious marginalisation, food ration cuts and identity issues.

The book explores the politics of “home” as the place where one’s umbilical cord is buried versus where one has built a life for himself. We see a conflict economy arise through a successful black market that caters for the needs of the hundreds of thousands of refugees.

We encounter greed, corruption by border police, and suspicious manoeuvrings by humanitarian aid organisations like the UN and the World Food Programme. We learn that “food is the currency” that one must have in order to do anything, whether it is calling home or travelling.

Daadab’s inhabitants aren’t allowed to work and must find a medium of exchange. They do this by selling off their food rations, which are then repacked and sold in Mogadishu.

We get a peek at the complex aid web that is the relationship between donors, humanitarian agencies, the Kenya and Somalia governments, local politicians who run sugar syndicates, and warlords.

Rawlence uses vivid picturesque language, expertly weaving the different stories together as one navigates seamlessly through the borders of Kenya and Somalia, revealing the lives of refugees as a gamble, and life in general as a lottery ticket.