Whether arriving in hope or leaving in despair, the story of migration has provided an impetus for some magnificent fiction. Here are Sunjeev Sahota’s top 10

I’m the son of immigrants. My dad came to England in 1966, the year Miss India was crowned Miss World. He was 12. My mother landed in 1978, sent by her family to marry my dad, a man she’d met once, briefly and in the company of her aunt. My dad is also the son of immigrants: in 1947, my grandparents had to flee their village in the newly created country of Pakistan and build a new life on the other side of the partition line. When people ask my family where they’re from, they say “baar”, a colloquial word which means the part of Panjab that is now in Pakistan. But “baar” also nods to “outside”, to being outsiders. It’s a state of being that I think all immigrants and their offspring come to wrestle with, which isn’t to lament the act of migration, but to wonder if the essential hopefulness of the act makes it impossible to hear the doors quietly locking behind you.

In Retrospective, the final story in this collection, Boaz is an Israeli who’s followed his American wife, Mira, to Boston. Their marriage is faltering – he “exists so fully in his head”, while she is “casually alive”. The story becomes an exploration into the limits of love, and Boaz, though he might now “crave space like a New Englander”, can’t at all find a language that will explain to him his American marriage, not “a single word to describe this kind of loneliness”.

The Year of the Runaways by Sunjeev Sahota review – a brilliant political novel about migrant workers in Sheffield Read more

Last year, in India, I spoke to a deported illegal immigrant who said he’d come to England so that “kuch ban jaweh”, “something might be made” - a future, perhaps. It reminded me of the immigrants in Cather’s novel - from Bohemia, mainly, but also Scandinavia – who live in sod-houses and work the Nebraskan soil, where “there was nothing but land; not a country at all, but the material out of which countries are made”.

3. A Question of Power by Bessie Head

Elizabeth, a mixed-race woman, isn’t considered white enough in South Africa and not black enough by the Batswana, in the country of her migration. What follows is a radical, form-busting novel that shows emigration effecting a necessary madness; a madness that allows Elizabeth to resist the power plays of race and gender and, at the end, create and claim a new identity for herself as a migrant African woman.

This is the best non-fiction account I’ve read on the partition of India, and Khan is especially brilliant on showing that partition wasn’t a done deal; that there were other ideas on the table, including a tantalising solution that involved federated states throughout India. It’s also a book full of striking images: girls decorating camels outside a polling station, gangs of boys in homemade tin helmets, government officials forced to use thorns instead of paper clips, and a marriage bureau organised to put “displaced men and women in touch with each other”.

“Hell-Heaven”, a short story in this collection, is the tale of Aparna, a married Bengali woman in Massachusetts, and of a younger man called Pranab; their relationship is recounted years later by Aparna’s daughter, Usha. The story is very moving on the difficult negotiation between tradition and its opposite, and the price exacted no matter what you choose.

This is the story of Zou Lei, a Chinese-Muslim illegal immigrant, and Brad Skinner, a disillusioned soldier, “stop-lossed” from Iraq. Zou, whose name means “thunder”, shows great resilience; it’s Brad who struggles to cope. The book is full of detail, sometimes upsetting, often beautiful in the way it gives a scene life: “He came towards her, his arms whispering on the body of his parka.”

7. Pinjar by Amrita Pritam

Pinjar, which means “skeleton”, distinguishes itself by being one of the very few novels that looks at the partition of India, and the subsequent migrations, through the eyes of a woman. It’s a deeply compassionate story, and in Puro, it has a brave and mercurial protagonist. Khushwant Singh’s translation is, perhaps understandably, quite literal-minded, though it risks not doing sufficient justice to the artistry of Pritam’s Panjabi.

8. Giants in the Earth by Ole Edvart Rølvaag

Clearly, voluntary migration is an act of hopefulness, and there are probably few more hopeful than Per Hansa, a Norwegian who in 1873 brings his wife Beret, son Ole, and little Anna Marie to the Dakota territory: “No lack of opportunity in that country, he has been told!” What stays with me from this novel – and perhaps grieves me, too – is Per’s optimism, his refusal to look at the facts, how even in the harshest prairie winter he is out there, toiling heroically, convinced he can build a place to call home.

“All these rogues have tongues on castors,” says Aunt Bertha, showing that she has a pretty good tongue herself, and it is the language of this novel that I love the most: from the vivacity of the characters’ Yiddish (“We must cleave to them like mire on a pig!”) to the arguably more precise rendering of their English (“So watz’e want?” “Cow shid I know?”)

Set mostly in Cape Town, this is a novel concerned with the travails of illegal black migrants in that city. The football World Cup – “the greatest event ever to take place in Africa” – is around the corner and Chipo, an albino from Zimbabwe, is seeking her fortune. Sweet, plucky, curious, she’s a great and open-hearted guide to this new South Africa.