The number of children's books featuring families migrating to the UK is not large. Those that do exist mainly relate the experiences of people from the Caribeean and the Indian sub-continent, these being the largest and most well-established ethnic minority communities in Britain.

Books for adults about migration from the Caribbean to the UK have often been highly regarded, from Samuel Selvon's The Lonely Londoners (Longman) to Andrea Levy's prizewinning Small Island (Review). There have also been a number of books for children based on the authors' own experiences. Sadly Hope Leaves Jamaica by Kate Elizabeth Ernest and Many Rivers to Cross by Errol Lloyd (who is better known as an illustrator) are out of print, as is Leslyn in London a novel for younger children by Grace Nichols.

Coming to England (Puffin) is Floella Benjamin's autobiographical account of her childhood in Trinidad and her family's migration to Britain in 1960. The warmth and strength she gained from her family are strongly evoked, as are her feelings of bewilderment at the ignorance and racism they encountered. 

Trish Cooke, best known as author of the picture book So Much (Walker) has written The Diary of a Young West Indian Immigrant (Franklin Watts), the fictional diary of Gloria Charles who travels from Dominica in 1961 to live with her parents who have already settled in England. The diary, kept from 1961 to 1965, gives many insights into what it was like for young people at that time to migrate and adapt to a different society.

A more recent addition to Caribbean migration literature is Surprising Joy (Macmillan), a first novel by poet Valerie Bloom. The book is in two parts, the first set in Jamaica where Joy lives with her grandmother, longing for her mother to write and tell her it's time to come and join her in the UK. In the second part of the book, Joy arrives in England and, in addition to adjusting to a new culture which is colder in both climate and in the way social relationships are conducted, she must cope with discovering a family secret.

Many children's writers of Caribbean who are published in the UK are known as poets rather than novelists. Best known among them are James Berry and Valerie Bloom from Jamaica, and John Agard and Grace Nichols from Guyana. Their poems often touch on the contrasts between England and the Caribbean (including the weather!). Try Grace Nichols' Everybody Got a Gift (A & C Black), James Berry's Only One of Me (Macmillan) and Valerie Bloom's The World isSweet (Bloomsbury) to get the flavour. John Agard and Grace Nichols are also the editors of two stunningly illustrated anthologies A Caribbean Dozen and Underthe Moon & Over the Sea (both Walker). The latter was the winner of the first CLPE Poetry Award (see www.clpe.co.uk) and includes a section entitled 'Windrush Child' about moving away from the Caribbean.

Benjamin Zephaniah is a Black British poet whose family came from the Caribbean. He has written several novels for young people, including the well-received Refugee Boy (Bloomsbury) whose central character is from Africa, with one parent from Ethiopia and one from Eritrea. The opening chapters mirror each other, showing the futility of war as a devastating experience for ordinary people whatever 'side' they appear to be on.

Also focussing on the tragic circumstances under which some children leave Africa, sometimes without their parents, is Beverley Naidoo's The Other Side of Truth (Puffin). Two children travel to London from Nigeria as political refugees after the sudden and shocking death of their mother. The circumstances in which Sade and Femi find themselves, and how they attempt to take control of their lives, raises many issues about politics, racism and refugees in the context of a fast-moving story. Web of Lies continues their story. They are reunited with their father and Femi struggles to stay out of trouble.

Few British picture books feature the experiences of migrants and refugees. An exception is The Colour of Home by Mary Hoffman and Karin Littlewood (Frances Lincoln) which lets us into the world of Hassan, a young boy who has just arrived in Britain from Somalia. He expresses his feelings about the terrors he has witnessed through making paintings. His teacher finds a way, with the help of an interpreter, to help him settle into his new home.

People who have migrated from Asia, in particular India, Pakistan and Bangladesh are a major cultural grouping in the UK. This encompasses a wide range of people speaking a variety of languages and practising different religions. This diversity is not represented by such a wide range of books. Jamila Gavin is perhaps the UK's best known author of Asian origin. In her autobiography Out of India (Hodder) she describes her early life as the child of an Indian father and an English mother living between and within two cultures. Her books cover a wide range of subject matter. In Grandpa Chatterji (Egmont), the eponymous gentleman comes to stay with his daughter's family in Britain for the first time. He is a charming character who reveals much about their Indian cultural heritage to his grandchildren and who also revels in new experiences, such as rides at the fairground. This is a good portrayal of a family who are comfortably settled in England while still valuing their ancestral culture. In a second book, the family visit Grandpa Chatterji in India and a third title is forthcoming. Jamila Gavin's trilogy for older children that began with The Wheel of Surya (Egmont) is set mainly in India. However, a significant part of the first book involves the two central child characters travelling to England in search of their father.

Elizabeth Lutzeier's Lost for Words (Oxford University Press) movingly describes the experiences of Aysha from Bangladesh whose file in her English school shockingly has the words 'Aysha Begum — No Language' inscribed on it in green felt tip, showing no recognition that she has a language — Bengali — she just does not speak any English yet.

Focussing more on second generation experience, Narinder Dhami has written a novel based on the popular film Bend It LikeBeckham (Hodder) about an Asian girl who wants to be a footballer. More recently she has narrated the adventures of three sisters in a series beginning with Bindi Babes (Corgi Yearling), depicting the lives of modern Asian girls in Britain with much good humour, as Meera Syal has done in her adult novels which could also have appeal for teenagers, Anita and Me (Flamingo) and Life Isn't All Ha Ha Hee Hee (Black Swan).

Bali Rai's first novel (un)arranged marriage (Corgi) is about a boy from a Punjabi family living in the English Midlands who is anxious to avoid an arranged marriage. His subsequent books include Rani and Sukh (Corgi) a modern day Romeo and Juliet story about Asian families living in Leicester.

It almost always takes some time after significant migration from a particular part of the world before any literature appears describing the experience of moving and settling in a new home. This partly explains why there are more books featuring characters from the Caribbean and the Indian sub-continent. However, this cannot entirely explain the lack of books featuring certain communities. For example, there are few books featuring people from China and Vietnam. There have been a small number of titles about Vietnamese people — for example Ian Strachan's Journey of a Thousand Miles and its sequel The SecondStep, Bernard Ashley's Boat Girl and Diana Kidd's Onion Tears (set in Australia) but these are all out of print and the writers are not Vietnamese in origin.

There are as yet few children's books in English about people migrating from Eastern to Western Europe. One of the few authors to write about this is Gaye Hicyilmaz. Girl in Red (Orion) is told from the viewpoint of an English boy observing the reactions of his community to the appearance of a gypsy family from Romania and his growing interest in the girl Emilia. The sequel Pictures from the Fire is Emilia's own story, which contains much sadness and tells readers about her life before migrating to England. Gaye Hicyilmaz's first novel The Frozen Waterfall (Orion) drew on her own experiences of having lived in Turkey and Switzerland, to tell the story of Selda and her family who leave Turkey for Switzerland and their adjustment to a new life and language.

When I worked as a secondary school librarian some years ago, there were a number of Greek Cypriot students and it was impossible to find any fiction about Cyprus. It would have been good to have been able to offer them, and other students, for that matter, Making Sense by Nadia Marks (Piccadilly Press). In some respects a light-hearted teenage novel, it manages to combine this with understanding the concerns of Greek Cypriot Julia who at first only longs to go back to Cyprus, but gradually finds herself liking her new home in England.

Leon Rosselson's Home is a Place Called Nowhere (Oxford University Press) relates the experiences of Amina who appears to have been abandoned by her mother who came to Britain from an unknown country when she was a baby. When she finally meets her mother, she discovers that their country of origin is Palestine and she learns about the recent history of her family and their country in which they became 'Refugees in their own land'.  Along the way she meets others who are refugees and finds out about the racism they encounter from the authorities and the wider society. This includes Kurdish Leyla, who is working in a cafe and who helps Amina. They visit Mama Luminita, a woman who cares for refugee children from many countries who describe their tragic histories to Amina.

The experiences of refugees from Afghanistan have been related in two recent books by Morris Gleitzman who is so adept at combining humour with pathos in any given situation. In Boy Overboard (Puffin) the focus is on Jamal and Bibi and their perilous journey. In a companion book Girl Underground, two Australian children try and rescue them from a detention centre. Also originating in Australia, but available in the UK is Roseanne Hawke's Soraya the Storyteller (Allen & Unwin), in which stories from the Arabian Nights are interwoven with Soraya's modern day life adapting to life in Australia.

If British children want to read about the experiences of children and families migrating from one country to another, or those children themselves want to see experiences similar to their own reflected in literature, they may need to turn to American books to gain a fuller picture. Exploring this literature has its own value but the experiences do vary. For example, I have been able to find few children's books by authors of Chinese origin published in the UK. It's possible to buy imported books by the prolific Chinese American author Laurence Yep who writes interestingly about both contemporary life in California and the lives of Chinese people who migrated in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Chinese Canadian Paul Yee also writes about the latter, most recently in The Bone Collector's Son, published simultaneously in the UK and Canada by Tradewind Books. Set in Vancouver in 1907, it tells of a boy who has to help his father dig up the remains of Chinese people in order to send them back to China for permanent burial. The living conditions at the time are described and readers gain insight into Bing's fear of ghosts and how he deals with this.

Posted July 2005