A multiethnic study of how race, gender, and citizenship affected major twentieth-century internal migrations in U.S. history and narrative.

* INSTANT NATIONAL BESTSELLER * Amazon Editors' Pick for Best Book of the Year in Fiction "Visceral and haunting" (New York Times Book Review) · "Hopeful" (Washington Post) · "Powerful" (Los Angeles Times) · "Thrilling" (TIME) · "Tantalizingly beautiful" (Elle) · "Suspenseful, atmospheric" (Vogue) · "Aching and poignant" (Guardian) · "Gripping" (The Economist) Franny Stone has always been the kind of woman who is able to love but unable to stay. Leaving behind everything but her research gear, she arrives in Greenland with a singular purpose: to follow the last Arctic terns in the world on what might be their final migration to Antarctica. Franny talks her way onto a fishing boat, and she and the crew set sail, traveling ever further from shore and safety. But as Franny’s history begins to unspool—a passionate love affair, an absent family, a devastating crime—it becomes clear that she is chasing more than just the birds. When Franny's dark secrets catch up with her, how much is she willing to risk for one more chance at redemption? Epic and intimate, heartbreaking and galvanizing, Charlotte McConaghy's Migrations is an ode to a disappearing world and a breathtaking page-turner about the possibility of hope against all odds.

Analyzes the impact of political and economic trends on migration narratives and films in Peru and Bolivia in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Winner of the John Dos Passos Prize for Literature “Stunning.”—Newsweek With the same audacity with which John Steinbeck wrote about migrant worker conditions in The Grapes of Wrath and T.C. Boyle in The Tortilla Curtain, Viramontes presents a moving and powerful vision of the lives of the men, women, and children who endure a second-class existence and labor under dangerous conditions in California's fields. At the center of this powerful tale is Estrella, a girl about to cross the perilous border to womanhood. What she knows of life comes from her mother, who has survived abandonment by her husband in a land that treats her as if she were invisible, even though she and her children pick the crops of the farms that feed its people. But within Estrella, seeds of growth and change are stirring. And in the arms of Alejo, they burst into a full, fierce flower as she tastes the joy and pain of first love. Pushed to the margins of society, she learns to fight back and is able to help the young farmworker she loves when his ambitions and very life are threatened in a harvest of death. Infused with the beauty of the California landscape and shifting splendors of the passing seasons juxtaposed with the bleakness of poverty, this vividly imagined novel is worthy of the people it celebrates and whose story it tells so magnificently. The simple lyrical beauty of Viramontes' prose, her haunting use of image and metaphor, and the urgency of her themes all announce Under the Feat of Jesus as a landmark work of American fiction.

This book examines how the transcultural and transnational migration of people, texts, and ideas has transformed the paradigm of national literature, with Britain and Ireland as case studies. The study questions definitions of migration and migrant literature that focus solely on the work of authors with migrant backgrounds, and suggests that migration is not extraneous but intrinsic to contemporary understandings of national literature in a global context. The fictional work of authors such as Caryl Phillips, Colum McCann, Abdulrazak Gurnah, Rose Tremain, Elif Shafak, and Evelyn Conlon is analysed from a variety of perspectives, including transculturality, cosmopolitanism, and Afropolitanism, so as to emphasise how their work fosters an understanding of national literature, as well as of individual and collective identities, based on transborder interconnectivity.

Examines the underlying precarity in twenty-first-century immigrant fiction and reveals the contradictions inherent in neoliberalism as an ideology.

NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD WINNER • NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • In this beautifully written masterwork, the Pulitzer Prize–winnner and bestselling author of Caste chronicles one of the great untold stories of American history: the decades-long migration of black citizens who fled the South for northern and western cities, in search of a better life. From 1915 to 1970, this exodus of almost six million people changed the face of America. Wilkerson compares this epic migration to the migrations of other peoples in history. She interviewed more than a thousand people, and gained access to new data and official records, to write this definitive and vividly dramatic account of how these American journeys unfolded, altering our cities, our country, and ourselves. With stunning historical detail, Wilkerson tells this story through the lives of three unique individuals: Ida Mae Gladney, who in 1937 left sharecropping and prejudice in Mississippi for Chicago, where she achieved quiet blue-collar success and, in old age, voted for Barack Obama when he ran for an Illinois Senate seat; sharp and quick-tempered George Starling, who in 1945 fled Florida for Harlem, where he endangered his job fighting for civil rights, saw his family fall, and finally found peace in God; and Robert Foster, who left Louisiana in 1953 to pursue a medical career, the personal physician to Ray Charles as part of a glitteringly successful medical career, which allowed him to purchase a grand home where he often threw exuberant parties. Wilkerson brilliantly captures their first treacherous and exhausting cross-country trips by car and train and their new lives in colonies that grew into ghettos, as well as how they changed these cities with southern food, faith, and culture and improved them with discipline, drive, and hard work. Both a riveting microcosm and a major assessment, The Warmth of Other Suns is a bold, remarkable, and riveting work, a superb account of an “unrecognized immigration” within our own land. Through the breadth of its narrative, the beauty of the writing, the depth of its research, and the fullness of the people and lives portrayed herein, this book is destined to become a classic.

From the New York Times columnist, a portrait of a family and the cycles of joy and grief that mark the natural world: “Has the makings of an American classic.” —Ann Patchett Growing up in Alabama, Margaret Renkl was a devoted reader, an explorer of riverbeds and red-dirt roads, and a fiercely loved daughter. Here, in brief essays, she traces a tender and honest portrait of her complicated parents—her exuberant, creative mother; her steady, supportive father—and of the bittersweet moments that accompany a child’s transition to caregiver. And here, braided into the overall narrative, Renkl offers observations on the world surrounding her suburban Nashville home. Ringing with rapture and heartache, these essays convey the dignity of bluebirds and rat snakes, monarch butterflies and native bees. As these two threads haunt and harmonize with each other, Renkl suggests that there is astonishment to be found in common things: in what seems ordinary, in what we all share. For in both worlds—the natural one and our own—“the shadow side of love is always loss, and grief is only love’s own twin.” Gorgeously illustrated by the author’s brother, Billy Renkl, Late Migrations is an assured and memorable debut. “Magnificent . . . Readers will savor each page and the many gems of wisdom they contain.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

Homing the Metropole presents a new approach to diasporic fiction that reorients postcolonial readings of migration away from processes of displacement and rupture towards those of placement and homemaking. While notions of home have frequently been associated with essentialist understandings of nation and race, an uncritical investment in tropes of homelessness can prove equally hegemonic. By synthesising postcolonial and intersectional feminist theory, this work establishes the migrant domestic space as a central location of resistance, countering notions of the private sphere as static, uncreative and apolitical. Through close readings of fiction emerging from the African, Caribbean and South Asian diasporas, it reassesses our conception of home in light of contemporary realities of globalisation and forced migration, providing a valuable critique of the celebration of unfixed subject positions that has been a central tenet of postcolonial studies.

"An extraordinary novel... as beautiful and as wrenching as anything I've ever read" Emily St. John Mandel "An adventure of a wilder sort" Vogue US A dark past. An impossible journey. The will to survive. How far you would you go for love? Franny Stone is determined to go to the end of the earth, following the last of the Arctic terns on what may be their final migration to Antarctica. As animal populations plummet and commercial fishing faces prohibition, Franny talks her way onto one of the few remaining boats heading south. But as she and the eccentric crew travel further from shore and safety, the dark secrets of Franny's life begin to unspool. A daughter's yearning search for her mother. An impulsive, passionate marriage. A shocking crime. Haunted by love and violence, Franny must confront what she is really running towards - and from. The Last Migration is a wild, gripping and deeply moving novel from a brilliant young writer. From the west coast of Ireland to Australia and remote Greenland, through crashing Atlantic swells to the bottom of the world, this is an ode to the wild places and creatures now threatened, and an epic story of the possibility of hope against all odds. "Gripping, tender and beautifully done. This novel is as intimate as it is urgent-you emerge thrilled and dazed, but also galvanized to save the planet" Anna Funder "This keening lament of an adventure is compelling" Observer "Compulsive stuff, driven at a cracking pace by the power of the elements and the fierce will of its single-minded narrator" Daily Mail