Every so often a book finds new readers decades after it was written, not because it was rediscovered but because the world circles back to needing it. Jim DeFede’s “The Day the World Came to Town,” newly reissued in an updated edition, is having exactly that moment — climbing back onto the bestseller charts on the strength of word of mouth and its status as the true story behind the Broadway musical “Come From Away.”
The premise is almost absurdly simple, and that simplicity is the source of its power. On the morning of September 11, 2001, as American airspace slammed shut, 38 jetliners carrying nearly 7,000 passengers were diverted to Gander, Newfoundland — a town of just over 10,000 people whose airport had mostly been a relic of the propeller age. DeFede, a Miami Herald columnist, reconstructs the five days that followed almost minute by minute: the confused passengers held on grounded planes for nearly 24 hours before being allowed off; the townspeople who emptied their pantries, opened their homes, and canceled a bus drivers’ strike so no one would go unfed or unsheltered; and the strange, suspended community that formed between strangers who had nothing in common except the accident of having landed in the same small place at the worst possible moment.
What makes the book more than a feel-good curiosity is DeFede’s reporting instinct. He resists the temptation to flatten Gander’s response into simple sainthood, instead finding the specific, human-scaled details that make the story credible rather than saccharine — the pharmacist who worked around the clock to fill prescriptions for strangers using medical records read over the phone, the local Legion hall turned into a makeshift daycare, the small frictions and misunderstandings that come from suddenly doubling a town’s population overnight. The updated edition adds material that traces what happened to several of the passengers and Gander residents in the years since, including the wave of renewed attention that arrived with the musical’s success, and it’s a genuinely moving addition rather than a marketing afterthought.
Critical reception, both on first publication in 2002 and in this reissue, has been consistently warm, with reviewers across the political spectrum treating it as a rare example of a 9/11-adjacent book that finds hope without minimizing the horror of the day itself. Commentary around the new edition has focused less on re-litigating the book’s craft — which was well-established two decades ago — and more on why its story has resonated so durably: at a moment when American civic life often feels defined by suspicion of strangers, a true story about a town that responded to crisis with reflexive generosity functions almost as a corrective. Some critics have noted that the book, like the musical it inspired, risks being read as a tidy morality tale about “the best of humanity,” and that its power depends partly on the fact that Gander’s response was genuinely exceptional rather than typical. That’s a fair caveat, but it doesn’t undercut what DeFede actually documented.
Two decades on, “The Day the World Came to Town” reads less like a period piece about a single terrible week and more like proof of concept for a kind of community response that most of us hope we’d rise to and privately doubt we would. It’s a short, fast read, and an unusually good one to hand to someone who thinks they already know everything worth knowing about September 11.
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