Our staff recommends:
Reading about exile is not the first thing that springs to mind when you’re looking for some light entertainment on a Tuesday evening. And rightly so.
For books about exile will do exactly the opposite. They will move and unsettle you; challenge you to leave the comfort of your old convictions and permanently change both you and your Tuesday.
They will not necessarily tell you the things you want to hear, but the ones you don’t; the necessary things that can’t remain unsaid. They might scare the life out of you. Make you witness some heartbreaking moments which lie beyond our language, comprehension and humanity. They might introduce you to strange characters, customs, and places. Make fun of your culture and your language. And make you feel, as something grand begins to collapse in you, that a hand has come out and taken your own.
Sounds tough and unsettling? Yes, and isn’t that precisely what good books are for?
Simple Acts recommends...
We're not literary buffs or anything but we know what we like, so every month we're going to highlight a book that we've loved.
We've put together a massive list of books about exile for you. With plot synopses, reviews, author information and links what are you reading this for?
Through a story written by Michael Bond as part of the Simple Acts campaign, Paddington bear tells of his arrival in Britain and how a sticky paw can make the UK more welcoming for other refugees.
Read Paddington Bear's Simple Act
Some food for thought...
That exile is changing voltages and kilohertz, life with an adapter, so we don't burn ourselves. That exile is the history of our temporary rented apartments, the first lonely mornings as we spread out the map of the town in silence, find on the map the name of our street and mark it with a cross in pencil.
Dubravka Ugresic
I will not serve that in which I no longer believe whether it call itself my home, my fatherland or my church: and I will try to express myself in some mode of life or art as freely as I can and as wholly as I can, using for my defence the only arms I allow myself to use, silence, exile, and cunning.
James Joyce
It is part of morality not to be at home in one's home.
Theodro Adorno
If Englishness doesn’t define me, then redefine Englishness.
Andrea Levy
The language I have learnt these forty years,
My native English, now I must forgo,
And now my tongue’s use is to me no more
Than an unstringèd viol or a harp.
William Shakespeare
Most people are principally aware of one culture, one setting, one home; exiles are aware of at least two, and this plurality of vision gives rise to an awareness of simultaneous dimensions, an awareness that -- to borrow a phrase from music--is contrapuntal.
Edward Said
