The Accidental Immigrants (2025)
Why this one?
It was nominated for the 2025 Orwell Prize for Political Fiction, and although it didn’t win I spotted a few very complimentary reviews and the description sounded very much up my street.
Jo McMillan was born in the UK in the late 1970s, raised in Tamworth by her mother, a teacher and “card-carrying” communist. She was actively engaged in anti-capitalist politics from a young age, and regularly visited the GDR with her mother during her childhood. She studied at SOAS in London and published her doctorate on "Sex, Science and Morality in China.” She later lived in China and is now a citizen of the UK and Germany, living in Berlin. Her first novel, based closely on her childhood with her mother, and titled Motherland, was published in 2015. Her second, The Happiness Factory (2022), drew on her time in China. The Accidental Immigrants is her third novel, published earlier in 2025 by Bluemoose Books (who have also published many books by the excellent Benjamin Myers).
Thoughts, etc.
The Accidental Immigrants is set on the Mediterranean island of St. Mira. It’s an independent country with historic ties to Greece but also a sizeable post-colonial British presence. In the wake of financial crises and an ineffective centrist government, it has also recently seen the rise of a nativist political party, the ‘Firsters’. When a bomb goes off at a British military base on the island just weeks before a general election, everything falls into place for a whitewash for the Firsters. Our focal points on the island are Tess, a translator with both St. Miran and British roots, and her partner Arlo, a Brit teaching the ‘Life in the UK’ course to St. Miran residents who want to emigrate to his home country. As the Firsters sweep to power, and immediately introduce new laws targeting foreigners on the island, Tess and Arlo find themselves strangers in the land they have made their home for years.
McMillan purposefully locates this book in our present-day reality, not masking the allegory with an elaborate or fantastical dystopia but instead grounding it in truths of the Europe of the past decade. The Firsters’ speeches and policies are drawn directly (often using direct quotes) from emergent Far Right parties in the UK, Germany and beyond. Occasionally (and notably at the UK border which figures later in the book) the quotes are not from emergent outsiders like the AfD or Reform, but from the actual policies of successive governments aimed at appeasing sizeable factions of the public in these countries who see immigration as a threat to their way of lives. The Accidental Immigrants doesn’t attempt to cloak any of this reality in metaphor or exaggerate it for effect: its most terrifying feats of storytelling are those that we realise are happening already.
If you think this all sounds a bit close to the bone and, well, depressing… then you’d be right. It’s not a remotely easy read in 2025, and it’s clearly not intended to be. Its central characters are well-drawn, rounded human beings with lives, jobs, friends, and families, and although the direction of travel politically is clear from the start of the book, we are still given enough time to develop sympathy for them as they become caught up in the ‘hostile environment’ introduced by the Firsters. Arlo’s despair as he finds himself officially stateless - not welcome in St. Mira and unable to travel with his expired (and subsequently shredded by the authorities) British passport - is particularly harrowing.
Overall, it’s an urgent and compelling read. It’s both human in its depictions of its characters and their fears in the face of a rapidly changing reality, and unnerving in its depiction of the present and worsening realities facing those who want to move freely in the modern world. Notably, it does this largely without resorting to hyperbole or invention: in this book, all that’s required to make life impossible for a substantial section of society is a few new laws and the swift imposition of bureaucracy. Of course, this is all aided by the thuggish footsoldiers of fascism, self-organising mobs (‘Neighbourhood Watch’ here, in a particularly dark bit of close-to-home humour) who happily provide the fearmongering and violence while the government is able to keep its hands ostensibly clean.
That’s not to say I thought it was entirely flawless, though. Its central concept shares something in common with the Booker-winning Prophet Song, which I also found generally impressive but was rightly scrutinised for centring its immigration-based narrative on a ‘relatable’ set of characters of white anglophone origin, rather than highlighting the realities faced in the here and now by those who are generally not operating from that position of relative privilege. In both cases, I understand the authorial intent in doing so, but also appreciate the counter-argument. In this case, I also felt the book was trying somewhat to have its cake and eat it, by essentially setting up St. Mira as a ‘mirror of the UK’ (a phrase used in publicity and many reviews) in which its British citizens must escape to… the actual UK. I think there’s something purposefully Kafka-esque about the whole situation but I still had questions about this setup. Not least the fact that there was a lingering sense throughout that somehow the Brits back home would eventually look after the Brits abroad and all would be well, a fact somewhat borne out by the happy-ish ending.
Those slight reservations didn’t stop me from finding this a rewarding and timely read, though. I think if even a handful of people pick up this book (perhaps after a Booker listing - which doesn’t seem beyond the realms of possibility) and start to question their assumptions about those who are trying to escape hostile environments in other countries and then find themselves subject to much the same thing when they desperately arrive on our shores, then it will have been a worthwhile exercise. Even beyond that, it’s a gripping read with some memorable characters and set-pieces that deserves the wide praise it has received to date.
Score
8.5
Great writing and extremely timely. A few question marks didn’t dent my overall enjoyment.
Next up
TBC.
