What We Leave We Carry: Voices of Migration to Britain

Author: Colin Grant

United Kingdom, Great Britain

Published on 4 June 2026 by Vintage Publishing (Jonathan Cape) in the United Kingdom.

Hardback | 336 pages
242 x 164 x 31mm | 536g

'A beautiful tapestry... Uplifting' Bernardine EvaristoWhat do we leave behind when we move to a new place – and what do we carry with us, physically and emotionally, wherever we land?Here are the voices of people who have come to Britain to make a new life: a Czech-Roma lawyer in Reading, an Iranian taxi driver in Shropshire, a Sierra Leonean actor in Northampton, a Romanian police officer in Edinburgh.

Colin Grant has travelled the country and listened to their stories – foundational tales of arriving in a new land, along with rarely spoken stories of love and loss. Together, these accounts ask questions about assimilation, identity, belonging and the emotional cost of migration in twenty-first-century Britain.

Candid, profoundly human, sometimes funny and always moving, What We Leave We Carry is a chance to listen to Britain – in all its richness and complexity.

PRAISE FOR HOMECOMING by COLIN GRANT:'Oral history at its finest' Daily Mail'Prickles with beautiful, comic and brutal details' Observer'An extraordinary and compelling book' Daily Telegraph'Utterly fascinating' New Statesman'A hopeful, angry, tear-jerking read' Grazia'Essential reading' Guardian