Books on Refugees for World Book Day
Books are powerful. They teach, bring joy and change lives. They can give people freedom and escape through their imaginations — as well as by changing the world.
Books change the world, not least because they change human consciousness. Rousseau’s ideas had a profound effect on the French Revolution, while Charles Dickens’ Nicholas Nickleby led to long lasting reforms in the English school system.
— Palash Krishna Mehrotra
There are so many books to recommend and read (it’s my day off and I’ve been working through Ben Goldacre’s Bad Science), but because we work to support refugees — and because we want the world to change for the better for refugees — here’s a list around that topic.*
I’ve tried to arrange the list into three sections:
- Home (highlighting what life is like in some countries and why people might flee),
- Journey (what life is like after you’ve fled), and
- Home? (to discuss what life might be like for people at their destination).
Some of the books overlap the sections.
Reading is the sole means by which we slip, involuntarily, often helplessly, into another’s skin, another’s voice, another’s soul.
— Joyce Carol Oates
Home
Anne Frank, The diary of a young girl (Penguin, 1947)
Ben Rawlence, City of Thorns: Nine Lives in the World’s Largest Refugee Camp (Thorndike Press, 2016)
Children Just Like Me (DK, 2016)
Diana Drake, My House in Damascus: An Inside View of the Syrian Revolution (Haus Publishing, 2014)
Ishmael Beah, A long way gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier (Macmillan, 2008)
Joe Sacco, Safe Area Gorazde (Fantagraphics, 2000)
John Gallas (ed.), The Song Atlas: A book of world poetry (Carcanet, 2002)
Judith Kerr, When Hitler stole pink rabbit (Penguin Random House, 1971)
Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner (Riverhead, 2013)
Linda Sue Park, A Long Walk to Water (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011)
Malala Yousafzai & Kerascoët (illustrator), Malala’s Magic Pencil (Puffin, 2017)
Michael Morpurgo, Shadow (HarperCollins, 2012)
Philip Gourevitc, We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families: Stories from Rwanda (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998)
Robin Yassin-Kassab & Leila Al-Shami, Burning Country: Syrians in Revolution and War (Pluto Press, 2016)
Sara Novic, Girl at War: A Novel (Penguin Random House, 2016)
no one leaves home unless
home is the mouth of a shark.
— Warsan Shire
Journey
Ceri Roberts & Hanane Kai (illustrator), Refugees and Migrants (Hatchette, 2016)
Dave Eggers, What is the what (McSweeney’s, 2007)
Eoin Colfer, Andrew Donkin & Giovanni Rigano (illustrator) Illegal (Hodder, 2017)
Francesca Sann, The Journey (Flying Eye Books, 2016)
Gulwali Passarlay, The Lightless Sky (Atlantic, 2016)
Kate Evans, Threads From the Refugee Crisis (Verso, 2017)
Kate Milner, My name is not Refugee (Bucket List, 2017)
Michel Agier, On the Margins of the World: The Refugee Experience Today (Polity, 2008)
Patrick Kingsley, The New Odyssey: The Story of the European Refugee Crisis (Guardian Faber, 2016)
Reece Jones, Violent Borders: Refugees and the Right to Move (Verso, 2016)
Ruben Andersson, Illegality, Inc.: Clandestine Migration and the Business of Bordering Europe (University of California Press, 2014)
Wolfgang Bauer, Crossing the Sea: With Syrians on the Exodus to Europe (And Other Stories, 2016)
Home?
What’s it like to live in a country that doesn’t trust you and doesn’t want you unless you win an Olympic gold medal or a national baking competition?
— The Good Immigrant
Anthony Browne, Bear goes to town (Puffin, 1995)
Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (Verso, 1983)
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Americanah (Alfred A. Knopf, 2013)
Daniel Trilling, Bloody Nasty People: The Rise of Britain’s Far Right (Verso, 2013)
Emma Carroll, Letters from the Lighthouse (Faber & Faber, 2017)
Hannah Jones et. al, Go home? The politics of immigration controversies (Manchester University Press, 2017)
Jackie Kay, James Procter & Gemma Robinson, Out of Bounds: British Black & Asian Poets (Bloodaxe, 2012)
Michael Bond, A Bear Called Paddington (HarperCollins, 1985)
Nikesh Shukla (ed.), The Good Immigrant (Unbound, 2016)
Reni Eddo-Lodge, Why I’m no longer talking to white people about race (Bloomsbury, 2017)
We Are All Born Free (Amnesty International)
There’ll be loads of great books on this issue that I haven’t read. For a couple of other lists, see ‘15 Works of Contemporary Literature by and About Refugees’ (E. Temple on LitHub) and ‘12 Excellent Books to Understand the Refugee Experience’ (K. Rice on Signature).
If you buy any of these books, remember to “grab your wallet” and boycott Amazon. Local bookshops can probably order most books you ask for. There are also alternatives to Amazon if you’re buying online.
If you’re interested in supporting education work that happens in Calais, check out the work of our partners the School Bus Project.
Also learn about the Education and Empowerment Centre in Lebanon that Help Refugees funds.
BOOK POWER
BOOKS FEED AND CURE AND
CHORTLE AND COLLIDEIn all this willful world
of thud and thump and thunder
man’s relevance to books
continues to declare.Books are meat and medicine
and flame and flight and flower,
steel, stitch, and cloud and clout,
and drumbeats in the air.— Gwendolyn Brooks
*I’ve not read all of these book. Some were suggested by friends (thanks Adrian, Rowena, Alex, Keziah, Micaela, Sandy, Maddie, Maddy, Gemma, and Emma).
