2025 New Immigration Books Reading List, Your contributions needed!
Help build a curated collection of fresh, thoughtful reads by sharing your favorite books about immigration.
Twice each year, I invite you to help build a community-powered reading list featuring the most insightful, imaginative, and urgent new books about immigration. This isn’t just a list—it’s a living, evolving archive of how we understand movement, belonging, borders, and identity today.
In a time when migration is often reduced to headlines and soundbites, books offer us space: space to be curious, to challenge assumptions, and to listen deeply. They help us think more critically—and more compassionately—about how people move through the world.
So here’s the ask: Have you read a recently published (or forthcoming) book about immigration that you loved or found thought-provoking?
If the answer is YES, please drop it in the comments below. I’ll be compiling your suggestions into the 2025 Immigration Reading List, to be published later this month.
What Will the Final Post Look Like?
If you're new here, check out last year’s reading list from late 2024 below—it was one of the most shared and discussed posts on the blog! The upcoming post will follow a similar format, organizing books by theme, genre, or region to help readers navigate and explore. To avoid duplicates, feel free to skim that post before adding your recommendation.
What Kinds of Books am I Looking For?
Please think expansively. Immigration isn't one story or one kind of book. I'm especially looking to highlight a range of voices, geographies, and styles. Nonfiction books like Love Beyond Borders are always appreciated—but don’t stop there. Think:
Fiction where migration is central
Graphic novels that explore identity and borders
Poetry that makes you feel the weight of leaving and arriving
Academic work that sharpens our understanding
Biographies or memoirs that illuminate lived experience
Manuals and guides that offer practical insight
If a book helped you think differently about migration—or even about the meaning of home—share it.
For more diverse examples, check out my recent post below about alternative media:
Alternative Ways of Seeing Immigration: Visual, Literary, and Creative Approaches
Immigration is often framed in the language of policy, law, and statistics. But to truly understand it from an emotional and human level, we need more than just data. We need images, architecture, storytelling, photography and poetry. We need creative approaches that bring migration to life, making it something we can see, feel, and experience.
What Counts as an “Immigration Book”?
Let’s keep our definition of immigration broad and layered. Yes, stories about cross-border migration. But also:
Internal migration, like in The Warmth of Other Suns
Narratives of displacement, exile, or return like No Friend But the Mountains
Speculative or magical realism that reimagines movement (Signs Preceding the End of the World, anyone?)
This list is as much about movement as it is about meaning. About the stories that challenge dominant narratives and help us imagine more humane futures.
Timeframe
Please focus on books published in late 2024 (not included in the previous post) or those scheduled for release in 2025. Bonus points for fresh titles most readers haven’t seen yet.
How to Contribute
Post your book recommendation in the comments below. Just the author and title is enough, but if you have a sentence or two about why it resonated with you, please include it—that context often sparks deeper interest and conversation.
If someone’s already mentioned your pick, go ahead and give it a ❤️ or reply to let me know it’s got multiple fans.
Note to Authors
You are encouraged to promote your own book—don’t hold back!
Join the Goodreads Immigration Book Club
If you are on Goodreads, join the Immigration Book Club. To make it easy to find and discuss all of these books in one place, I posted all of the books that were included in the previous post in this group. I will add new books to the group once the post is published.
Will you contribute?
Support public scholarship
Just a reminder that this newsletter is only possible because of your support. If you believe in keeping this work free and open to the public, consider becoming a paid subscriber. You can read more about the mission and focus of this newsletter and learn why, after three years, I finally decided to offer a paid option. If you already support this newsletter financially, thank you.
Would you consider putting your list on Storygraph as well for those of us who have left Amazon-owned Goodreads?
Have you already included Sarah Towle's "Crossing the Line" in your list? https://sarahtowle.com