Caroline Moorehead

Roads to Somewhere

The Unsettling of Europe: The Great Migration, 1945 to the Present

By

Allen Lane 548pp £30 order from our bookshop

In the winter of 2000, I went to Lapland to visit a family of southern Sudanese who had been resettled in Finland as part of a new and generous initiative to find homes for some of the thousands of people uprooted in Sudan’s civil wars. I met them in a language class in a nursery school, the very tall Dinka men – most of them well over six feet – perched on very small chairs, looking cold and incongruous in this dark northern European setting. They were doctors, lawyers and teachers, and they spoke of their gratitude towards their hosts and the pride they felt that their children would be among Finland’s first black citizens. Their stories encompassed much of what Peter Gatrell writes about in The Unsettling of Europe: flight, trauma, terrifying journeys, a yearning for safety and the desire for a new life for one’s children.

Sign Up to our newsletter

Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.

Follow Literary Review on Twitter

  • Last Tweets

    • 'I don’t think we’re here on Earth to be Happy. I think we’re here on Earth to help God. I am a messianic writer'.… ,
    • 'Darley’s book is not a mad dash through this most compelling and complex of English counties. Nor is it another ti… ,
    • 'Moser’s book offers such a gripping account of a profoundly damaged human being, trapped in a cycle of repetition,… ,
    • 'Ideas that I’d thought were set down in full continue to smoulder ... this book is only a snapshot of some larger… ,
    • 'Full of invention which, at its most pedestrian, is eminently Victorian, and at its most unrestrained wildly imagi… ,
    • 'What in other hands could have been a dry, pedantic account of Christianity’s birth and evolution becomes in Holla… ,
    • RT : One of my favourite literary magazines is celebrating 40 years this year. Here is the September edition of… ,
    Follow Us