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The Migrants
  • Published: 14 April 2026
  • ISBN: 9780241670125
  • Imprint: Allen Lane
  • Format: Hardback
  • Pages: 320
  • RRP: $59.99

The Migrants

A Memoir with Manuscripts

Formats & editions
Hardback
14 Apr 2026
EBook
9 Apr 2026
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A brilliant memoir of adolescence in New Zealand and of the migration of European manuscripts to the far side of the world

Christopher de Hamel is one of the world’s best-known scholars and writers on illuminated manuscripts. He was mostly brought up in the south of New Zealand, where his family moved when he was four. This book magically evokes a childhood at vast distance from Europe, recalling his thrill and wonder in first encountering medieval manuscripts in libraries there and the realization that they too are migrants far from home.

The Migrants explores the immense journeys of books and people. It is a tale of colonization and the migration of culture – of motives and idealism, triumphs and disasters – bringing us face-to-face with history. We meet the colonial governor on his paradise island, the shipwrecked accountant, the nonagenarian who cut up manuscripts, the magnate who unknowingly bought Becket’s Boethius and the early settler who inscribed his Book of Hours in the Maori language in 1842. We travel with the author today back to where these manuscripts began their own lives, through France and Poland and medieval England, discovering their first owners and following the longest journeys on earth.

This is a coming-of-age saga with extraordinary twists, crossing many hundreds of years and tens of thousands of miles, recounted with passion, humour and a lifetime’s reflection.
  • Published: 14 April 2026
  • ISBN: 9780241670125
  • Imprint: Allen Lane
  • Format: Hardback
  • Pages: 320
  • RRP: $59.99
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About the author

Christopher de Hamel

In the course of a long career at Sotheby’s and at Cambridge University, Christopher de Hamel has probably handled more medieval manuscripts than anyone alive and his delight and enthusiasm in them run through all he writes. His many books, translated into numerous languages, include A History of Illuminated Manuscripts, Meetings with Remarkable Manuscripts (winner of the Duff Cooper Prize and the Wolfson History Prize), The Book in the Cathedral: The Last Relic of Thomas Becket and The Posthumous Papers of the Manuscripts Club. He is a Life Fellow of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. He lives in London.
portrait photo of Christopher de Hamel

Also by Christopher de Hamel

The Posthumous Papers of the Manuscripts Club
The Book in the Cathedral
Meetings with Remarkable Manuscripts
See all

Praise for The Migrants

[Christopher de Hamel] combines enthusiasm with scholarly precision and a conversational style that sits surprisingly easily with the fund of knowledge he has gradually accumulated ... the joy of this book are de Hamel’s true ‘intimate companions’, the manuscripts, and his ability to evoke the thrill and wonder he feels as he encounters them, whether it’s a 12th-century copy of Boethius he finds in Wellington, probably designed for Thomas Becket, or a Bible in Auckland, which he traces back to a Cistercian monastery in north-central Poland

Mark Bostridge, Spectator

Christopher de Hamel holds a world of experience. [His] reminiscences of New Zealand are fondly Arcadian, but his imaginary garden is stocked with volumes not vegetation ...

Peter Conrad, Literary Review

[The Migrants] is the most personal of de Hamel's books. It takes the meeting of the Old World and New as its core subject [and] tells the winding stories of those illuminated manuscripts that he first came upon improbably as a boy and which fostered his sense of wonder. The coming-of-age insights and forays into New Zealand’s colonial context are illuminating in the manuscript sense: adding richness to something already fine. As a story of a life as lucky, fantastical and singular as the journeys the manuscripts have undertaken, it’s a delight

Jonathan McAloon, Financial Times

For 55 years, Christopher de Hamel has been producing coruscating books attesting to his fascination with manuscripts as artistic treasures and witnesses to history, and his empathy with enthusiasts of all countries and times. The Migrants brings the story home, revealing how his own life has been coloured and enriched by these precious pieces of paper, and drawing arresting parallels between the histories of human beings and the trajectories of books .... the author has done a signal service to the land of the long white cloud, writing this most distant domain into the mainstream of history.

Derek Turner, Engelsberg Ideas

Absorbing and often unexpected... The Migrants is about the books and pages that travelled to New Zealand and the young obsessive who reversed their path back to the metropole.

Jo Livingstone, New Statesman