Welcome back to Book Break.
In today's video we are going to be travelling the world, hearing some of the best, most
moving, and most powerful stories of immigration.
And so it's perfect, I've come to film this video today at Stanfords Bookshop, which is
this absolutely beautiful travel bookshop, filled with books from all over the world
as well as beautiful old maps and globes.
So, let's get on with the book recommendations.
Our first book is going to take us from Sri Lanka to Australia, and that is Amnesty by
Aravind Adiga.
So this is the story of Danny, who is an undocumented migrant living in Sydney working as a cleaner,
and one day he becomes the sole witness to a crime, and so the whole book takes place
over the course of this one day, with flashbacks telling us more about Danny's life leading
up to that moment, while Danny grapples with this moral question: should he come forward
with what he knows, but then risk getting deported, or keep lying low from the authorities
but then have to carry this moral burden with him?
Next, Correspondents by Tim Murphy is a multi-generational story that takes us from Ireland and Lebanon
to the USA to Iraq and beyond.
So this focuses on an Irish Lebanese woman called Rita who grows up in Boston in the
80s, her family moved to the US during the golden age of immigration, and she grows up
with both cultures of her heritage very very present.
She then studies Arabic at university, becomes a journalist, and is sent as a foreign correspondent
to Iraq, right after the American invasion of 2003.
And there she meets a local boy who works as her translator, but he is hiding a secret
of his own.
And so as the war intensifies, their situation becomes increasingly unsafe, and they are
eventually forced out of the country once more.
So this book really follows generations of displacement and it is very moving.
Next, to England, for a really beautiful little book, this is England: Poems from a School,
a poetry collection edited by Kate Clanchy.
So all of these poems have been written by students of Oxford Spires Academy, which is
a comprehensive school in Oxford with a huge migrant population, over 30 languages are
spoken at the school, and everyone, including the white British students, is a minority.
So Kate Clanchy works as the writer in residence there, and she mentored these students to
write poems about their experiences of immigration and of England as a second home.
So there are so many really beautiful poems in here, but I've just picked an extract of
one that I found particularly moving.
It's a really short poem called To Make a Homeland by Amina Abou Kerech, and she was
13 when she wrote this.
'Can anyone teach me how to make a homeland?
Heartfelt thanks if you can.
Heartiest thanks, from the house barrows, the apple trees of Syria, and yours very sincerely.'
Our next book takes us from Vietnam to the US, and that is On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous
by Ocean Vuong.
So this book is written as a letter from our main character Little Dog who's in his 20s,
written to his mother even though she can't read.
And he talks to her about his experiences of making a home in this country, of his first
falling in love with a boy, and of the love he feels for his mother and grandmother, even
as the distance between their experiences widens.
And the fact that he's writing such a beautiful letter to his mother who can't even speak
English let alone read it, it's just a testament to this gulf that's widening between them.
And the first line of the book really sums that up, which is 'I am writing to reach you,
even if each word I put down is one word further from where you are.'
And Ocean Vuong is a poet and this book just reads like poetry.
Now our next book is going to take us from Syria to Turkey to Greece on to Brazil just
to name a few.
This is the memoir Butterfly by Yusra Mardini, who is such an amazing young woman.
So back in 2015 when she was just a teenager, she fled her native Syria to the Turkish coast,
where she boarded a dinghy of refugees heading to safety in Greece.
But the overcrowding of this really tiny boat caused the engine to cut out and the boat
started to sink.
So Yusra, who was training as a swimmer, got into the water and with the help of her sister
and two other people, they pushed the boat through open water for over three hours until
they reached the island of Lesbos.
And a year later, Yusra ended up joining the first ever Olympic Refugee team, and competing
in Brazil in 2016.
And now she's still pursuing her swimming career, but she's also a goodwill ambassador
for the UN Refugee Agency, and she's really committed to altering global perceptions of
refugees.
She is just such an amazing person.
And another memoir by an amazing person is No Friend But the Mountains by Behrouz Boochani,
which takes us from Iran to Papa New Guinea.
So Boochani is a Kurdish journalist, who fled Iran to seek asylum in Australia, for fear
of being arrested by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard.
But the boat was intercepted and he ended up being detained illegally on Manus Island.
And this book was written over the course of five years, sent one Whatsapp message at
a time, from a secret mobile phone that he had in the prison, to a friend who compiled
them and translated it into English.
And he eventually left Manus Island after six years, has now gone to New Zealand, and
is working to draw attention of other people like him.
Now My Parents by Aleksandar Hemon takes us from Bosnia to Canada, this is literally the
story of Hemon's parents, and their immigration from a war-torn Bosnia to Canada.
And it's this really intimate portrait of these two people and their struggles, and
how in immigrating you don't just lose your home, but you also lose so much of your identity
and what you understand about your life.
And it's a companion book so if you flip over on the back you have This Does Not Belong
to You, which is Aleksandar Hemon's own memories of his childhood in Bosnia.
So they're printed together, you can read them in either order.
And then I've got two children's books to finish with, so A House Without Walls by Elizabeth
Laird takes us from Syria to Jordan.
This is about a 13 year old girl called Safiya who was forced out of her homeland because
of civil war.
And she and her family end up living in a tent on her uncle's land in Jordan.
So she knows that she's lucky not to have to be living in a refugee camp, but she still
doesn't like having to miss school to look after and cook for her father and brother.
And also the tensions that have always existed in her family start to come to the surface,
as they figure out how to build their new life.
And finally, a classic memoir for children is Coming to England by Floella Benjamin.
So this one takes us from Trinidad to England, following the journey of young Floella, who
left to rejoin her parents who she hadn't seen in 15 months.
So after world war 2, a lot of people were called from the West Indies to England to
help rebuild England and that's exactly what her family did.
And 15 months later, Floella and her siblings left behind the island paradise that they
called home to move to this very cold, dirty, and very racist country, where they learned
that they had to work twice as hard and be twice as good as everyone else, in order to
succeed.
So it's a really moving memoir that has become a classic for a reason.
So please do leave us a comment below with any recommendations of your own of books about
immigration, and of course give this video a thumbs up if you liked it, and hit that
subscribe button below for new videos every week.
Coming up next week we're celebrating International Women's Day with books where women take over.
And I will also leave the link to Stanfords' website below, so do check it out and come
pay them a visit, it's an absolutely gorgeous shop here.
See you next time.