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What We Leave We Carry: Voices of Migration to Britain
  • Published: 4 July 2026
  • ISBN: 9781787333161
  • Imprint: Jonathan Cape
  • Format: Hardback
  • Pages: 336
  • RRP: $65.00

What We Leave We Carry: Voices of Migration to Britain

Formats & editions
Hardback
4 July 2026
EBook
4 June 2026
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Fascinating conversations about migration to Britain, giving voice to communities who have collectively shaped, complicated and enriched our culture

What 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
  • Published: 4 July 2026
  • ISBN: 9781787333161
  • Imprint: Jonathan Cape
  • Format: Hardback
  • Pages: 336
  • RRP: $65.00
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About the author

Colin Grant

Colin Grant is an author, historian and critic. He has written acclaimed biographies of the Wailers and of Marcus Garvey. Bageye at the Wheel, his memoir of growing up in a Caribbean family in 1970s Luton, was shortlisted for the PEN Ackerley Prize. His history of epilepsy, A Smell of Burning, was a Sunday Times Book of the Year. Homecoming: Voices of the Windrush Generation, was a BBC Radio 4 Book of the Week and Daily Telegraph Book of the Year. His most recent book, I'm Black So You Don't Have to Be was a New Statesman Book of the Year. He is director of WritersMosaic, a division of the RLF, and a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
portrait photo of Colin Grant

Also by Colin Grant

I'm Black So You Don't Have to Be
Homecoming
A Smell of Burning
Bageye at the Wheel
I & I: The Natural Mystics
Negro with a Hat: Marcus Garvey
See all

Praise for What We Leave We Carry: Voices of Migration to Britain

A powerful antidote to the false binaries of what does and doesn't make a British citizen. A real example of literature that meets the moment... Thankfully, voices like the ones gathered in What We Leave We Carry exist to offer an expansive clearer eyed path to understanding ourselves, others and the "othered"

Raymond Antrobus