Refugees

The second world war was won in the cafés of central Europe – the intellectual milieu that produced Edward Teller, Leo Szilard and Eugene Wigner, and before them Albert Einstein. But even though America was an alluring destination, many of the 1930s escapees from Nazism ended up in Britain. There were scientists in their number, too, but Owen Hatherley concentrates on the newcomers’ effect on how post-war Britain looked. He examines their role in photography and film; in the design of printed books; in art, especially public art; and in architecture and town planning. Perry Anderson’s 1968 essay ‘Components of the National Character’ was dismissive of the impact of the diaspora.

They came on a small, crowded, leaky boat from Calais towards Dover in seas that could turn from placid to treacherous in an instant, around 30 people seeking sanctuary from persecution, unsure of the welcome they would receive. ‘We were seized by horrible vomitings and most of the party became so dreadfully ill they thought they were dying,’ one of the group, a young mother accompanied by her two children, wrote later. The year was 1620 and quite possibly among the refugees might have been a forebear of Nigel Farage. This small boat, one of many hundreds that crossed the Channel in the late 16th and early 17th centuries, was full of Huguenot asylum seekers fleeing Catholic France and the Lowlands.

Our summer holidays by the sea were the thrill of the year and the lifeboat was the thrill the holidays. Whissh-crack! went the maroon, sending the dauntless crew and their punchy little vessel off into the waves to save souls. The Royal National Lifeboat Institution has been doing this for 200 years. Mariners and all of us must hope it never stops, because its story is the best of us. In One Crew, Helen Doe, a maritime historian, writes the official history with verve and precision.

One Friday evening in a half-ruined, half-rebuilt city, where smart tourists dine out in restaurants next to refugees in makeshift shelters, a woman walks the streets. In torn clothes and slippers ‘worn ragged’, she hands out leaflets. On every piece of paper the same words are written: ‘Has anyone seen my daughter?’ On the same evening, in the same coastal city, which is ‘half obscured by skyscrapers’, another woman walks the streets with a different purpose, seeking to spend time away from her co-workers on a business trip. As she cradles her pregnant stomach, she watches as a female figure climbs over a clifftop railing and jumps, leaving behind a bag of leaflets. Later, the second woman has a miscarriage.

Lauren Beukes is a writer who puts cerebral propositions into breakneck thrillers: structural misogyny in The Shining Girls; the flipside of patriarchy in Afterland. In Bridge, she investigates the depressive’s favourite hypotheticals – could have, should have, would have, might have. The protagonist is Bridget, whose mother, Jo, has recently died from brain cancer. Jo was a scientist, interested in rather eccentric ideas, and has bequeathed Bridget a problematic legacy. It seems as if Jo had found a way, using harmonics, visual stimuli and an odd, worm-like thing (think fungus or parasite or the nematode in a tequila bottle) to access other realities. Through trial and error, Bridget manages to live up to her name and bridge universes.

Meet Ibrahim, from Syria. He fled Aleppo just before the bombs began to fall. A clean $4,000 in cash to a smuggler got him a fake passport and, voilà, a ticket to Europe – briefly in Greece, then in Germany (‘the people, they looked different’), now in Spain. Immigrant life was tough at first: the strange language, the alien norms, the overt racism. ‘He was not on their level. Just a refugee.’ Then a lucky break. He starred in a homemade porn video that went viral: ‘100 per cent real Arab bull.’ Next, he’s earning close to a seven-figure salary, owns a flash car and has women dripping off his arm. In Ben Judah’s illuminating depiction of modern-day Europe, almost everyone has a dream.

This is the kind of novel that will be discussed jubilantly in the book clubs of places like Lib Dem north Oxford. It is a social polemic disguised as fiction. Maggie Gee’s concerns are topical: migration, global warming, ‘the virus’, colour prejudice and first nations. The Red Children will be selective in its appeal. Strange red people with large heads suddenly appear in Ramsgate, and stand about naked on the seafront The plot is a surreal fantasy set on ‘the edge of England’, in Ramsgate, where Gee lives. Strange red people with large heads turn up suddenly and stand about naked on the seafront looking out to the Channel or in to Pegwell Bay.