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New books: 1) Belonging and Transnational Refugee Settlement: Unsettling the Everyday and the Extraordinary (by Jay Marlowe; published by Routledge) ( https://www.routledge.com/Belonging-and-Transnational-Refugee-Settlement-Unsettling-the-Everyday/Marlowe/p/book/9781138285453 ) The image we have of refugees is one of displacement – from their homes, families and countries – and yet, refugee settlement is increasingly becoming an experience of living simultaneously in places both proximate and distant, as people navigate and transcend international borders in numerous and novel ways. At the same time, border regimes remain central in defining the possibilities and constraints of meaningful settlement. This book examines the implications of ‘belonging’ in numerous places as increased mobilities and digital access create new global connectedness in uneven and unexpected ways. Belonging and Transnational Refugee Settlement positions refugee settlement as an ongoing transnational experience and identifies the importance of multiple belongings through several case studies based on original research in Australia and New Zealand, as well as at sites in the US, Canada and the UK. Demonstrating the interplay between everyday and extraordinary experiences and broadening the dominant refugee discourses, this book critiques the notion that meaningful settlement necessarily occurs in ‘local’ places. The author focuses on the extraordinary events of trauma and disasters alongside the everyday lives of refugees undertaking settlement, to provide a conceptual framework that embraces and honours the complexities of working with the ‘trauma story’ and identifies approaches to see beyond it. Should you be interested in reviewing the book, or if you know of anyone who might be interested in reviewing the book, you can order a review copy at this address: http://pages.email.taylorandfrancis.com/review-copy-request 2) The Invisible Crowd, by Ellen Wiles ( https://www.harpercollins.co.uk/9780008228811/the-invisible-crowd ) I would like to draw your attention to my debut novel, The Invisible Crowd, published by HarperCollins. It explores the human side of forced migration through the experience of an Eritrean asylum seeker in the UK. The novel was inspired by an asylum case I worked on as a barrister. I was struck by the disjunction between the dry, formal language of the legal documents and the sensationalist language of tabloid headlines about asylum seekers, and how neither came close to conveying the extraordinary human drama of the lives they represented. The 'imaginer' of the novel is a barrister called Jude who is ready to quit when a new case lands on her desk and she notices that she shares a birth date with the client, Yonas, yet could not have had a more different life. She gets drawn into his case, and imagines the set of witness statements coming to life. The novel brings this into being: with interjections from Jude, every other chapter is from Yonas's point of view, and every alternate chapter is from the point of view of a different person he meets along the way, including a bin man, an artist, a politician and a Home Office interviewer. I am currently doing a PhD in literary anthropology alongside writing fiction, and I am interested in the role of literary language and form to explore contemporary subjects in conjunction with and as an integral part of scholarly research. If you would like to find out more about the novel or to discuss these issues, please visit my site, http://www.ellenwiles.com or email me at [log in to unmask] Finally, if you do read and enjoy the novel, I would be extremely grateful if you could take a moment to write a short review online, or to share your response with me directly. Best wishes, Ellen ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Note: The material contained in this communication comes to you from the Forced Migration Discussion List which is moderated by the Refugee Studies Centre (RSC), Oxford Department of International Development, University of Oxford. It does not necessarily reflect the views of the RSC or the University. If you re-print, copy, archive or re-post this message please retain this disclaimer. Quotations or extracts should include attribution to the original sources. E-mail: [log in to unmask] Posting guidelines: http://www.forcedmigration.org/research-resources/discussion/forced-migration-discussion-list-posting-guidelines Subscribe/unsubscribe: http://tinyurl.com/fmlist-join-leave List Archives: http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/lists/forced-migration.html RSS: https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cgi-bin/webadmin?RSS&L=forced-migration Twitter: http://twitter.com/#!/refugeestudies Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/refugeestudiescentre