No Friend but the Mountains, the book that inspired Luke Styles’ orchestral and choral song cycle of the same name, is an autobiographical account of the experiences of a refugee unjustifiably imprisoned in Australia’s notorious detention centre on Papua New Guinea’s Manus Island.
The author, Behrouz Boochani, is a Kurdish–Iranian writer, film-maker and defender of human rights who fled Iran and ended up via Indonesia off the coast of Australia. His account, and Styles’ setting of it, speaks powerfully to the plight of refugees worldwide.
