A country of refuge

This lively and moving anthology of writing about the worlds of asylum-seekers includes short essays, memoirs, poetry and stories by an impressive array of writers including Sebastian Barry, Hanif Kureishi, A.L.Kennedy, William Boyd and Rose Tremain. This – inevitably personal – selection from the long list of contributors gives a fair picture of how successful the editor, Lucy Popescu, has been in assembling work of quality, in which the writing can match the seriousness of the human situations explored in the book.

Some contributors draw on direct personal experience of migration and the meaning of the losses it entails, others employ their imagination to explore these themes and to bring alive for us what it means to lose one’s home and one’s familiar world of place, persons and culture. There are documentary accounts of aspects of contemporary refugee experience from many parts of our war-torn world, and a sizeable number of chapters which tackle earlier migrations and their background. These include: the Irish potato famine and flight to North America, the persecution of Jews in nineteenth and twentieth century Europe and consequent Jewish diaspora, as well as the Caribbean migration now often referred to as the Windrush generation.

Popescu is a human rights activist and this is a book with an urgent political message about the inhumanity of which our species is capable. What makes it of particular interest to readers of this journal is the richness of the description of the emotional worlds of migrants, many of them quite young. Today’s writers of fiction, just like their great predecessors, have so much to give us in being able to understand how the human capacity for cruelty and kindness, mindlessness and thinking, selfishness and solidarity are all part of what constitutes the world we inhabit.

As one reads, there is shock and pain in recognising the repeated and widespread de-humanisation of refugees and the way in which the projective processes with which we