Khaled Hosseini’s Sea Prayer was inspired by the story of Aylan Kurdi, the three-year-old Syrian refugee who drowned in the Mediterranean Sea trying to reach Europe in September 2015.In the year that Aylan died, 4,176 refugees drowned or went missing trying to reach Europe like him. The book was written to commemorate the thousands of refugees who perished at sea while fleeing the horrors of war and the torture of imprisonment.