Last year, I was inspired by a local artist’s desk calendar to explore a series of cities in my reading. This year I’ve been exploring migration and lives in motion: often involuntary, frequently devastating, sometimes inspiring.

This sense of between-ness reminds me of this passage in a 2021 debut novel by Mina Seçkin, The Four Humors:

“The flight to and from Istanbul is one of my favorite things. Hearing the Turkish language in transit spaces that are rubbed clean of any cultural signifier fills me with something. A tribalism free from nationhood, government, control.”

Anuk Arudpragasam’s The Story of a Brief Marriage (2016) was his debut novel too, a slim and powerful prelude to A Passage North. It is a story to read in a single sitting, if possible: enveloping and disorienting. The titular marriage takes shape in a refugee camp: “Stretching out in front of him each tent in the vast settlement absorbed and reflected this light, like a nighttime gathering of wraiths with nowhere to hide.”

Life in the settlement presents possibilities that Dinesh would not have considered otherwise. In his mind, he locates a sense of calm amidst chaos, in which “everything that had happened could be let go of, the present made free finally to take on a different significance, his raw new skin ready, at last, for new memory and for new life.”

Yet, this marriage is unlike marriages he has observed: “But if they couldn’t talk about their past, what could they say to each other at all, given that there was no future for them to speak of either?”

And the overwhelming sense of the young couple’s story is one which remains fresh for me even now, months after finishing this story: “Things just happen and we have to accept them. Happiness and sadness are for people who can control what happens to them.”

At around two hundred pages, it would be possible to read Obadian M’s memoir in a single sitting too, but perhaps because the span of time it covers is so expansive, I read Die Walking : A Child’s Journey through Genocide more like a volume of poetry, just a couple of its short chapters in a sitting.

Originally, I was drawn to this story because Geoffrey York contributed the introduction; York is one of the writers (The Dispossessed, People of the Pines) whose work sparked my interest in indigenous peoples’ history and culture. Here he writes from his experience as Africa Bureau Chief for The Globe and Mail, orients readers with this thirteen-year-old boy’s experience of the First Congo War “one of the least documented conflicts of the twentieth century in one of the poorest corners of the world.”

The Rwandan invasion of Zaire in October 1996 targeted Hutu refugee camps and many ordinary citizens like this boy and his family, not even vaguely implicated in the political acts of retaliation, embarked on an unimaginable journey of suffering. He writes under a pseudonym for fear of reprisal.

Originally I didn’t think of Mansoor Adayfi’s memoir (written with Antonio Aiello), Don’t Forget Us Here (2021), fitting with this theme. But I soon reconsidered: “I worried my memories of home would be lost forever. Without them, who would I be?”

Yemeni-born Adayfi was kidnapped by warlords when he was eighteen, having travelled to Afghanistan before his university studies began. He was ransomed to the Americans, who believed he was a member of al Qaeda, a lie he perpetuated early on (because the warlords told him the Americans would kill him unless he was part of al Qaeda).

His account of being imprisoned for fourteen years (Lost and Found at Guantánamo) is riveting and propulsive. This “upside-down world where nothing made sense”, where “salt was more valuable than gold, daylight existed only in our dreams, iguanas had more rights than we did, and the rules changed every day, was “home”: terrifying, debilitating, and torturous. “It was a place where they’d rather believe lies than truth so long as it supported what they already believed. If our lives weren’t at stake, it would have been funny.”

Mexique: A Refugee Story from the Spanish Civil War by María José Ferrada and illustrated by Ana Penyas (2020) considers the story of 456 children who left Spain when civil war began in 1937. They sailed from France and journeyed on the Mexique.

The cover illustration shows the kids on deck; the images are based on photographs of the “Children of Morelia” and the story is based on research and interviews. The children did not expect to be away from home for long, but many never returned.

The historical note which follows the story considers such of the challenges of the situation and how the children’s experiences have played out, since, in other times and other places: “‘Where are you from?’ Maybe they couldn’t even answer that question. Because exile stole that answer from the ‘Children of Morelia’—and from all children forced to flee their countries and seek refuge elsewhere.”

Sanctuary (2020) by Paola Mendoza and Abby Sher is what the authors describe as neither a dystopia nor an allegory: “It is just a few steps into ‘What if…?’ It’s both bleak and hopeful; a call to arms.”  Much of the rhetoric could have been pulled from recent headlines in the U.S.: “We will wipe out the scourge of migrant invasion in a strong, decisive campaign. Thank you, maybe God bless you, and may God bless these United States of America.”

It opens with an intense and polarising scene and affords enough backstory to make the story seem simultaneously general and specific. “This is why Papi and I come to the United States. Because the mountains in Colombia have más sangre que agua, and we want to be here, safe with our family. We walk through Panama, Costa Rica, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico. All for both of you. Vali, you remember when we go to the beach and el parque de atracciones in San Diego?”

As an introduction to young readers, this could be a galvanising story. Our heroine is “quiet and angry and small as a clenched fist” and also fierce. (If unexpectedly wise at some junctures: “I couldn’t decide whether this was resilience, or foolishness.”) Readers who are already familiar with the themes and ideas here might be less engaged.

I include Qian Julie Wang’s Beautiful Country (2021) here, even though it’s a story about her family’s adjustment to life in America (not-so between), because her family feels so enduringly connected to China and her parents are undocumented.

As their only daughter, Qian feels suspended, in a liminal space. It feels so different from Kat Chow’s Seeing Ghosts, even though the girls were about the same age when they arrived in America. “Only later, after living many years in fear, would I understand that the risks were much lower than we believed at the time. But in the vacuum of anxiety that was undocumented life, fear was gaseous: it expanded to fill our entire world until it was all we could breathe.”

My apologies to whomever was waiting for my library copy of this biography; I dallied with her story, and read so slowly that, with her detailed attention to specific school years, for instance (like favourite teachers, which one gave her Charlotte’s Web and which one recommended The Giver), I felt like I was set to graduate myself along the way.

Both her loneliness and her expressiveness stood out to me and did not want the story to end; I flagged so many passages, that I grew impatient typing them out afterwards. I wanted to keep the entire chapter about the library, and I found even her simplest descriptions breath-taking: “The Brooklyn summer was the tiger mother I never had. She was in every sidewalk crack, on every black plastic bag, and in every pungent smell. It did not matter where I went. She was forever in my face, telling me to sift faster, to ignore my discomfort, all the while squeezing thick, salty sweat out of every pore.”

What stories have you read about immigration, migration, or between-ness recently?