The Aeneid by Virgil
One of the great epics about migrants, with themes that are as important now as they were 2,000 years ago. Aeneas is a refugee who flees war in what is now Turkey, and crisscrosses the Mediterranean before settling in Rome. And there’s a fine new translation (called The Aeneid) by Shadi Bartsch.
On Savage Shores: How Indigenous Americans Discovered Europe by Caroline Dodds Pennock
An exemplary work of recent non-fiction that retells the stories of Native Americans who came to Europe in the wake of the European conquest.
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The Art of Losing by Alice Zeniter, translated by Frank Wynne
A superb and underrated multi-generational tale of an extended Algerian family, set in Algeria and France from the 1950s to the present.
Homecoming: Voices of the Windrush Generation by Colin Grant
A well-crafted and deeply moving compilation of first-person accounts by Caribbean migrants who came to the UK between the 1940s and ’60s.
A Bear Called Paddington by Michael Bond, illustrated by Peggy Fortnum
Yes, Paddington, whose story can be read as the tale of an undocumented child migrant from Peru. He turns up at a certain railway station in the 1950s, claiming to have got there by lifeboat. And his real name, Pastuso, is too difficult for Londoners to pronounce.
