Themes
Books About Exile and Migration
Novels of displacement, migration and the longing for home.
20 books · ranked
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1
American Gods
Shadow Moon, recently released from prison, takes a job with the mysterious Mr Wednesday and finds himself at the centre of a war between the old gods brought to America by immigrants — Anansi, Odin, Anansi, Czernobog — and the new gods of media, technology and globalisation. Gaiman's novel is a myth of America as a land that forgets its gods.
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2
The World of Yesterday
Written in Brazilian exile weeks before his suicide in 1942, Zweig's memoir reconstructs the cosmopolitan, culturally rich Vienna of his youth and the Europe he loved — before two world wars dismantled it completely. One of the great elegies for a lost world, and one of the most clear-eyed accounts of how civilisation can be destroyed by forces that seemed, until they weren't, impossible.
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3
The Tempest
The magician Prospero, exiled on an island with his daughter Miranda and two servants, orchestrates the arrival of the enemies who usurped his Milanese dukedom. Shakespeare's last solo play meditates on power, art, forgiveness and the ambiguous freedom of the imagination.
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4
The City in the Middle of the Night
On a tidally locked planet where one side burns and the other freezes, two cities cling to survival in the narrow habitable zone — and a young woman exiled from one of them encounters the planet's indigenous, possibly sentient inhabitants. Anders's Locus Award-finalist novel is about colonialism, communication across genuinely alien difference, and what survival costs a society over generations.
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5
Brooklyn
Eilis Lacey, a young Irish woman, leaves County Wexford for Brooklyn in the early 1950s, finding work, education and an unexpected romance — only to be pulled back to Ireland by a family tragedy. Tóibín's quietly devastating novel is about the particular sorrow of the immigrant: the impossible choice between the life you have built and the world you left behind.
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6
My Ántonia
Jim Burden narrates the story of Ántonia Shimerda, the daughter of Bohemian immigrants who came to the Nebraska prairies in the 1880s. Cather's novel is a celebration of pioneer life and of a woman of extraordinary vitality and resilience — and also an elegy for a world that has passed.
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7
My Antonia
Jim Burden narrates his memory of Ántonia Shimerda, a Bohemian immigrant girl who arrived in Nebraska when Jim did as a child, and who becomes a symbol for everything Jim associates with the pioneer past. Cather's novel is an elegy for the immigrant experience and the prairie landscape, told from a deliberately partial, nostalgic perspective.
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8
There There
Twelve urban Native Americans converge on Oakland's Big Oakland Powwow — each with their own history of displacement, addiction, family loss and cultural reconnection. Orange's debut is told in overlapping voices that build toward an act of devastating violence, asking what it means to be Native American today in a city built on the erasure of Native existence.
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9
On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous
A young Vietnamese-American man writes a letter to his illiterate mother — about the grandfather he never knew, the grandmother who survived the Vietnam War, his own adolescence in Hartford Connecticut, and a first love that ended in opioid overdose. Vuong's debut novel is prose as concentrated as poetry, a meditation on language, inheritance and what immigrants pass down without knowing it.
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10
Exit West
Saeed and Nadia fall in love in an unnamed city under threat of civil war. They escape through magical doors that appear across the world, leading to refugee camps in Greece, a mansion in London, a hillside in California. Hamid's formally elegant novel abstracts the refugee crisis to its essential emotional reality — what migration does to love, identity and where you call home.
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11
The Four Winds
Elsa Wolcott, a Texas Panhandle farmer's wife during the Great Depression and Dust Bowl, must choose between staying on the land that is killing her and her family, or heading to California with the tide of migrants seeking a better life. Hannah's novel is both a love letter to The Grapes of Wrath and a portrait of women's wartime and Depression-era resilience.
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12
The Song of Achilles
Patroclus, a young Greek prince, is exiled to the court of Peleus where he meets the brilliant, gold-haired Achilles. Their childhood friendship becomes love; their love leads to Troy. Miller's retelling of the Iliad through the eyes of Patroclus is one of the most beloved retellings of classical myth in recent years.
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13
Days Without End
Thomas McNulty, an Irish immigrant in 1850s America, enlists with the US Army and serves through the Indian Wars and the Civil War — surviving through his love for his fellow soldier John Cole. Barry's National Book Award winner is a novel of extraordinary beauty about violence, tenderness and the survival of love in inhospitable places.
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14
In the Distance
A young Swedish boy travels from his homeland to the American West but ends up in California instead of New York, and spends decades moving east through the frontier, searching for his brother. Diaz's debut is a spare, elegant deconstruction of the Western, told by a giant of a man who is always the outsider everywhere he goes.
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15
We Need New Names
Darling grows up in Paradise, a Zimbabwean shantytown, stealing guavas and playing games with her friends, before being sent to live with her aunt in America. Bulawayo's debut novel follows Darling's immigration and assimilation — and her growing understanding of what she carried and what she left behind.
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16
Alias Grace
In 1843, Grace Marks — a sixteen-year-old Irish immigrant servant — was convicted of the murder of her employer and his housekeeper in Upper Canada. A young psychiatrist, assigned to assess her, tries to reconstruct what actually happened. Atwood's novel examines how stories about women — their bodies, their madness, their guilt — are constructed and what they conceal.
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17
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
In 1930s New York, Josef Kavalier — a Czech Jewish refugee with an escape artist's training — and his cousin Sammy Clay create a superhero comic called The Escapist. Chabon's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel is about escape in every sense: from Prague, from poverty, from the closet, from death, and finally from the stories we tell about ourselves.
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18
Small Island
Two couples — the Jamaican migrants Gilbert and Hortense, newly arrived in London in 1948, and the English couple Queenie and Bernard — share a house in the years after the Second World War. Levy's Orange Prize-winning novel asks what Britain promised the Windrush generation and what it actually gave them, exploring the gap between the coloniser's idea of England and its daily reality.
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19
The Buddha of Suburbia
Karim Amir — half-English, half-Indian — grows up in the South London suburbs in the 1970s and gradually makes his way into the worlds of theatre and popular culture. Kureishi's debut novel is both a coming-of-age story and a study in the specific experience of the child of South Asian immigrants in Thatcher-era Britain — what it means to be seen as perpetually foreign in the only country you know.
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20
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
Francie Nolan grows up in Williamsburg, Brooklyn in the early 20th century — in a family defined by a charming, alcoholic father and a relentlessly practical mother, by poverty and by an extraordinary hunger for books and beauty. Smith's novel is one of the great American coming-of-age stories and a portrait of immigrant aspiration that never sentimentalises the struggle.