Not at home at home, abroad when abroad

David Szalay, this year’s Booker Prize winner, is an unusual immigrant. Born to a Hungarian father and Canadian mother, and having lived in several countries, including the UK, Canada and Lebanon, he is today, ironically, an immigrant in his native country, Hungary. In an interview with BBC Radio, the writer said, “Even though my father is Hungarian, I never felt entirely at home in Hungary. I suppose I’m always a bit of an outsider there, and living away from the UK and London for so many years, I also had a similar feeling about London.” Szalay’s life traces a familiar but often overlooked trajectory — the circular migrant, someone who migrates not once, but repeatedly, acquiring new layers of estrangement in each move.

Szalay’s Booker-winning novel ‘Flesh’ follows the arc of Istvan, from his quiet housing complex in a Hungarian town, then as a struggling immigrant in London, and finally into a rarefied world of affluence. The book captures what it means to be untethered — never quite at home in the place one leaves, nor in the place one reaches. This is the friction Szalay says he wanted to explore: “a book that stretched between Hungary and London and involved a character who was not quite at home in either place.”

This tension of in-betweenness echoed throughout the Booker shortlist. Most of the writers who made it to the shortlist were immigrant or post-immigrant. Three of the six shortlisted books, including ‘Flesh’, Kiran Desai’s ‘The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny’, and Susan Choi’s ‘Flashlight’, lay bare the complexities of immigrant life.

The Booker website notes how these protagonists are “often caught between nations, finding it hard to fit in, and struggling with loneliness or isolation”. This captures the central paradox of the immigrant narrative: the dual identity, the simultaneous insider-outsider status, standing at the threshold of two countries yet belonging fully to neither.

Jhumpa Lahiri describes this poignantly. “A lot of my upbringing was about denying or fretting or evading,” she once said, acknowledging how the immigrant household is often built on anxieties that stretch across continents. Her debut novel ‘The Namesake’ embodies this duality. As Ashoke and Ashima attempt to re-root themselves in Massachusetts, the novel contrasts their experience with that of their children, who inhabit a hybrid terrain. The children are second-generation immigrants living between the inherited world of their parents and the American world that surrounds them. Yet Ashima, the first-generation immigrant, also comes to realise that Calcutta –- “the city that was once home” — has become foreign in its own way. Vikram Seth, too, captures this dislocation in his poem ‘Diwali’, describing those “who are not at home at home/and are abroad abroad”.

Earlier, much immigrant fiction followed a familiar track: the journey outward, the departure from a known setting — home, language, family, and perhaps a sense of self — into a new world where survival hinges on adapting to unfamiliar norms. But the reality is far more complex.

In her memoir ‘They Called Us Exceptional’, Indian-American writer Prachi Gupta describes the suffocating weight of the “model minority” expectation. Coming from a family that is educated, affluent and driven, she reflects on the unspoken demands of chasing the American Dream and how the immigrant minority is expected to speak and behave in a way acceptable to the West. Gupta reveals the emotional and cultural labour required to fit into what she calls a “hypercapitalist culture that only values us for what we can produce”. Her poignant address to her mother underscores this complexity: “I never asked you what hopes and dreams buoyed you amid the all-consuming loneliness and grief of leaving your family and your country behind.”

The immigrant experience is, therefore, no longer a single story. It has splintered into multiple strands.

Benyamin’s Malayalam novel ‘Aadujeevitham’ (Goat Days) and Sunjeev Sahota’s ‘The Year of the Runaways’ reveal the precarity and social invisibility that define the lives of undocumented migrants. The refugee narrative, by contrast, emerges in works such as Mohsin Hamid’s ‘Exit West’ and Khaled Hosseini’s ‘And The Mountains Echoed’, where displacement is abrupt, violent, and often irreversible. In Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s ‘Americanah’, migration becomes a series of crossings rather than a single departure.

Diaspora writing, in essence, shows identity evolving across cultural, racial, linguistic and political boundaries.

Return, too, is central to immigrant literature. The journey back — literal or symbolic — asks who one becomes after crossing borders and whether “home” remains a fixed, meaningful space.

Haitian-American author Edwidge Danticat offers an evocative view: “The idea of this great anguish of living between two worlds has diminished somewhat for many immigrant people.… I would like us to move beyond these tropes of being only between two worlds. We are at the same time speaking to no one and everyone.”

It is a reminder that immigrant narratives now encompass the multi-layered identities of a world where movement is constant, and where belonging can be multiple, partial or one driven by choice and circumstance.

— The writer is based in Bengaluru