Books in Motion: Migration Literature Book Club
What is Books in Motion?
Books in Motion: Migration Literature Book Club is the Global Migration Institute’s book club for readers interested in stories of movement, displacement and belonging. Our list ranges across short story collections, novels, memoirs and graphic narratives on migration, and we keep things flexible: we choose books that are available in print, e-book and audiobook formats, so everyone can read in the way that suits them.
Next up: Tell Me Pleasant Things about Immortality by Lindsay Wong
We will be meeting at Qishr Coffee in Toronto on Thursday, November 12. All are welcome!
Start your own Books in Motion circle
We’d love to see these conversations travel. If you’re interested in hosting a book club in your own community using the Global Migration Institute, please get in touch with Lara El Mekaui (lara.elmekaui@torontomu.ca) for advice and discussion prompts.
Our Inaugural Year: 2026 Reading List
Over coffee at Qishr, we met to read and talk about stories of leaving, arriving and everything in between. Here’s a look back at the books we read in our inaugural year:
1. How to Pronounce Knife by Souvankham Thammavongsa (Short stories)
About the author: Souvankham Thammavongsa was born in a Lao refugee camp in Nong Khai, Thailand, and raised in Toronto. She is also the author of several poetry collections. How to Pronounce Knife, her first story collection, won the 2020 Scotiabank Giller Prize.
From our conversation: We talked about settlement and migrant labour, the experience of first jobs in a new country, and how accents shape the way people are heard and treated. We also asked what integration really looks like, and what happens when it doesn’t come.
2. Open City by Teju Cole (Novel)
About the author: Teju Cole is a Nigerian American novelist, essayist, photographer and critic who grew up in Lagos. Open City, his first novel, won the PEN/Hemingway Award. He teaches creative writing at Harvard University.
From our conversation: We discussed the city as a character in its own right, and how the narrator uses intellectualization as a form of escape. We also talked about Afropolitanism and the experiences of international students.
3. Temporary People by Deepak Unnikrishnan (Linked stories)
About the author: Deepak Unnikrishnan was born and raised in Abu Dhabi to Indian parents. Temporary People won the inaugural Restless Books Prize for New Immigrant Writing. He teaches at New York University Abu Dhabi.
From our conversation: Our discussion centred on migrant labour and the lives of the guest workers who built the Gulf, people whose presence is essential and yet always treated as temporary.
4. Madonna in a Fur Coat by Sabahattin Ali (Novel in translation, from Turkish)
About the author: Sabahattin Ali (1907 to 1948) was a Turkish novelist, short story writer and poet. Published in 1943, Madonna in a Fur Coat became a bestseller in Turkey decades after his death and reached English readers in 2016 in a translation by Maureen Freely and Alexander Dawe.
From our conversation: We talked about cosmopolitanism in 1920s Berlin, the emotion and anguish of leaving, and escapism. We also debated whether Maria is a “manic pixie dream girl” or a woman who refuses the role Raif imagines for her.
Coming up:
5. Tell Me Pleasant Things about Immortality by Lindsay Wong (Short stories)
About the author: Lindsay Wong is the author of The Woo-Woo, a memoir that was a finalist for the Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Nonfiction and CBC’s Canada Reads. Tell Me Pleasant Things about Immortality, her debut story collection, was shortlisted for the Jim Deva Prize for Writing That Provokes. She teaches creative writing at the University of Winnipeg.
Coming up: We’ll be discussing this collection on Thursday, November 12, at Qishr Coffee, 21 Dundas Square, Suite 100, Toronto. All are welcome.
6. The Migrant Rain Falls in Reverse by Vinh Nguyen (Memoir)
About the author: Vinh Nguyen is a writer and scholar of critical refugee studies at Renison University College, University of Waterloo, and a nonfiction editor at The New Quarterly. He and his family fled Vietnam as refugees after the war. His “speculative memoir” follows his search for what happened to his father, who left Vietnam by boat in 1989 and disappeared. It was a finalist for the Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Nonfiction and the Governor General’s Literary Award.
Coming up: We’ll be discussing this memoir on Wednesday, December 2, at Qishr Coffee, 21 Dundas Square, Suite 100, Toronto. All are welcome.
Thank you to everyone who joined us this year. Your questions and stories made these books come alive.
Book talk: Vinh Nguyen
We’re delighted that Vinh Nguyen will join us as a featured author at the 2027 IMISCOE Spring Conference (March 10 to 12, 2027), continuing the conversation that began around our table.
2027 Reading List
The Global Migration Institute’s Book Club, Books in Motion will be back for a second year. Our members chose these books together, and they take us from Oman to Sicily, Mogadishu to Johannesburg, and Bulawayo to small-town British Columbia.
Here’s what we’ll be reading in 2027:
1. Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (Contemporary novel)
Ifemelu and Obinze leave military-ruled Nigeria, she for the United States and he for an undocumented life in London. It’s a novel about race, love and what it means to go home again.
Lara’s pick
2. Outside People and Other Stories by Mariam Pirbhai (Short stories)
Nine stories about immigrants, migrant workers and their families: a Filipino caregiver who has left her children behind, a Jamaican farm worker on an Ontario chicken farm, and a teacher who can’t find work in her field in Canada. We’re hoping to welcome the author, who lives in Southern Ontario, to our discussion.
Lara’s pick
3. Celestial Bodies by Jokha Alharthi (Novel in translation, from Arabic)
Three sisters in an Omani village, one of them waiting for a man who has emigrated to Canada, live through their country’s change from a slave-owning society to its present. It was the first novel originally written in Arabic to win the Booker International Prize.
Nick’s pick
4. Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi (Historical novel)
Two half-sisters in eighteenth-century Ghana: one marries a British colonial officer and the other is sold into slavery in America. Their descendants’ stories over eight generations show how forced displacement shapes lives long after the original crossing.
Aysen’s pick
5. A Man of Good Hope by Jonny Steinberg (Biography)
In 1991, eight-year-old Asad Abdullahi fled civil war in Mogadishu alone. Steinberg follows his journey across eastern and southern Africa to South Africa, and adds a journalist’s reflections on how people decide to move and what shapes those decisions.
Anna’s pick
6. The Silence of the Choir by Mohamed Mbougar Sarr (Novel in translation, from French)
Seventy-two young men seeking asylum arrive in a small Sicilian town. The novel shows, through many voices, what their arrival changes for everyone there while they wait to learn their fate.
Nick’s pick
7. Dandelion by Jamie Chai Yun Liew (Novel)
Lily’s mother walked out on the family when Lily was eleven and was never heard from again. Now a mother herself, Lily goes back to her childhood in a small British Columbia mining town, where her previously stateless father wanted the family to blend in and her mother longed to return to Brunei, and then travels to Southeast Asia to find out what happened.
Asma’s pick
8. Indignity: A Life Reimagined by Lea Ypi (Memoir)
When Ypi finds a photograph of her grandmother on her honeymoon in 1941, it challenges the family history she grew up with in communist Albania. She sets out to reconstruct her grandmother’s life across war, exile and political upheaval.
Lara’s pick
9. The Beekeeper of Aleppo by Christy Lefteri (Contemporary novel)
A beekeeper and his wife, an artist who lost her sight in the war, flee Aleppo and travel through Turkey and Greece toward an uncertain future in Britain.
Silindile’s pick
10. The Grass Is Singing by Doris Lessing (Classic novel)
Lessing’s first novel is a tense portrait of a white farmer’s wife in colonial southern Africa and her relationship with Moses, the Black man who works in her house. It shows a settler society coming apart under the pressure of its own racism.
Nick’s pick
11. Goodbye to Berlin by Christopher Isherwood (Autobiographical sketches)
Isherwood’s sketches of life in Berlin in the early 1930s, a city of foreigners, lodgers and drifters, as the Nazis rise to power. It inspired Cabaret.
Aysen’s pick
12. Gold Diggers by Sue Nyathi (Ensemble novel)
In 2008, at the height of Zimbabwe’s economic collapse, a group of passengers crowds into a minibus bound for Johannesburg, each looking for a better life in the “City of Gold.” We’re hoping to invite the author to join us online.
Silindile’s pick
13. If an Egyptian Cannot Speak English by Noor Naga (Experimental novel)
After the Arab Spring, an Egyptian American woman “returning” to a country she has never lived in falls for a former photographer of the revolution in Cairo. It’s an unsettling novel about desire, privilege and belonging.
Asma’s pick
Meet the curator
Lara El Mekaui curates Books in Motion. She is an editor, writer and researcher, currently the lead nonfiction editor at The New Quarterly and a Research Fellow at the Global Migration Institute. Her writing has appeared in World Literature Today, The New Quarterly, Wasafiri, EVENT, Annahar English, Beirut Today and Home Magazine. She edited Nour Abou Fayad’s debut novel The Complete Opposite of Everything (2019) and Nadia Tabbara’s debut book Harness Your Creativity (2018), and co-edited the poetry collection And We Chose Everything (2018).