KATE MARTIN
BOOKS TO LIVE BY●Mariella Frostrup
Feeling rootless? Home
is wherever you make it
WRITE TO
MARIELLA
Got a dilemma?
Email mariella@
sunday-times.
co.uk. Anonymity
on requestQ
After living in the UK for nearly 45 years, my
husband and I have retired to the Mediterranean
island where I was born. While we enjoy the
sun, the quietness, the walking, the swimming
and fresh produce, I don’t feel I belong. There is a
sense of having lost my home rather than regaining
it. After five years we have had plenty of time to
adjust. But I miss the UK and my friends there. As
a retired English teacher I read a lot, but I would
welcome recommendations about belonging,
nostalgia, loss of place, roots and longing for “home”.A
So many writers are inspired by their sense of
being alien to their surroundings, or unwelcome
in a new tribe. Belonging is as much as anything
a state of mind. From Monica Ali’s Brick Lane,
where a Bangladeshi woman is trapped like a latter-day
Rapunzel in a London tower block, to Chimamanda
Ngozi Adiche’s Americanah, which charts a Nigerian
student’s first experience of racism at university in
America, so much character, jeopardy and narrative canspring from the feeling of being a fish out of water.
Tales of diaspora, where people are uprooted
from the place they call home, are often the most
heartbreaking, but can also fill you with hope as you
embark with them on adventures of self-discovery
in unfamiliar places. Two of my choices below —
Colm Tóibín’s Brooklyn and Sebastian Barry’s Days
Without End — come from the Irish diaspora: as
observed in the recent Kenneth Branagh film that
evoked his Belfast childhood, “the Irish are made for
leaving”, and they do have quite a monopoly on stories
of displacement.
But my first choice is perhaps my favourite: Fugitive
Pieces, the award-winning debut novel by the Canadian
poet Anne Michaels, is a story of Holocaust survival
that has the distinction of being a book that made me
weep. I don’t mean a solitary, trickling tear but full-on
convulsing despair — incongruously while I was
sunbathing by a friend’s pool in Cape Town. There’s
plenty to tip you over the emotional precipice, but it’s
ultimately a clarion call to love and survival ■Fugitive Pieces
Anne Michaels
Bloomsbury, £9.99
Jakob Beer, a seven-year-old
Jew in Poland, is rescued
during the Holocaust by a
Greek geologist. He eventually
relocates to Canada, where he
becomes a poet, but he
cannot shake off the trauma of
the past, including the murder
of his parents and his sister’s
abduction by the Nazis. Jakob
never feels truly at home
anywhere, but through love he
learns to transcend tragedy.Brooklyn
Colm Tóibín
Penguin, £8.99
The Irish diaspora is rich with
tales of heartache. And Tóibín,
who last month won the
Rathbones Folio Prize for his
novel The Magician, is a writer
so suffused with unrequited
emotions, it’s a miracle he
hasn’t burst. In Brooklyn a
young Irish girl, Eilis, is sent to
America to make something of
her life. It’s a tale saturated
with longing for the familiar:
even love takes second place.Days Without End
Sebastian Barry
Faber, £8.99
Thomas McNulty is starved out
during Ireland’s Great Famine
and is determined to make his
way in the new world. Barry
teams his young hero up with
a fellow émigré, and the pair
support each other on myriad
adventures through the painful
loneliness of being “away from
their flock”. It’s a love story: for
home, for comfort, for safety
and for what we can build
from the cinders of the past.Americanah
Chimamanda Ngozi Adiche
Fourth Estate, £9.99
The always inspiring Adiche
shines a light on the life of a
well-to-do Nigerian girl,
Ifemelu, who goes to study in
the US. There she discovers
an unexpected form of
racism and isolation among
the liberal elite on campus.
Like Monica Ali’s Brick Lane,
Americanah opens our eyes
to an experience not our
own and leaves us more
empathetic for it.The Sunday Times Magazine • 47