A Literary Prescription for

Moving Abroad

Q: Does it ever really feel like home?

Usually, yes — but slowly, and in small, ordinary moments rather than one grand click of belonging: knowing the shortcuts, dreaming in the language, a neighbour who becomes a friend. Home is mostly a matter of having lived somewhere long enough.

For the strange, thrilling, lonely business of making a home somewhere new.

Moving to another country is two things at once: a great adventure and a quiet, ongoing grief. There is the thrill of the new — a different light, a different language, a self you get to remake — and underneath it the ache of everything left behind, and the odd loneliness of being a foreigner in the small, daily ways nobody warns you about. And there is the strange discovery that you now belong fully to neither place. These books, poems and quotes are company for all of it: the excitement and the homesickness, the slow work of turning a foreign town into somewhere that is, at last, home.

Books Poetry Quotes & Prose

Books

Prescribed reading

Three of these are the warm, funny memoirs of people who did exactly this — upped sticks and started again abroad — and three are novels about arriving somewhere new and slowly, awkwardly, learning to belong.

A Moveable Feast

Ernest Hemingway · 1964

Hemingway’s luminous memoir of being young, poor and gloriously alive in 1920s Paris. It is the book that makes you want to run away to a foreign city and become someone new — and it’s honest, too, about the hunger and doubt beneath the romance. The definitive account of how a place you move to can lodge itself in you for the rest of your life.

The Year of Living Danishly

Helen Russell · 2015

When her husband is offered a job at Lego, Russell moves to rural Denmark and spends a year investigating why Danes are reputedly the happiest people on earth. Funny, curious and full of useful observations about hygge, trust and slowing down, it’s part memoir, part experiment — lovely company for anyone adjusting to the strange rhythms of a new country.

Almost French

Sarah Turnbull · 2002

An honest, very funny memoir of an Australian journalist who follows a Frenchman to Paris and has to learn, from scratch, how to belong. Turnbull is clear-eyed about the loneliness and the endless small humiliations of being a foreigner, as well as the eventual, hard-won love of it. The most useful of these for the actual emotional experience.

The Girl at the Lion d’Or

Sebastian Faulks · 1989

A young woman arrives alone at a small hotel in 1930s France, carrying a secret and hoping to remake herself somewhere no one knows her. Faulks writes the particular solitude of the newcomer with great tenderness, and the atmosphere of provincial France is so vivid you can smell it. Quiet, atmospheric and moving.

A Year in the Merde

Stephen Clarke · 2004

A gleefully rude, very funny novel about a young Englishman’s bewildering year working in Paris — the strikes, the romance, the dog mess, the magnificent French disdain. The perfect antidote if the dreamy Provence books make it all look too easy: this one is honest about how absurd and maddening a new country can be, and laughs its way through.

The Hundred-Foot Journey

Richard C. Morais · 2010

An Indian family, uprooted by tragedy, opens a restaurant in a French village directly across the road from a Michelin-starred one, and culinary war — then something warmer — breaks out. A big-hearted novel about culture clash, food and the slow, delicious business of belonging somewhere that first rejected you.

Poems about leaving and belonging

For when prose is not enough

Three short poems, each read in a moment — the welcome every arrival hopes for, the homesickness that follows, and the slow making of a new home.

“The New Colossus”

Emma Lazarus, 1883

‘Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,’

The most famous welcome ever written, carved at the foot of the Statue of Liberty. Whatever your reason for crossing to a new shore, Lazarus speaks for the hope every arrival carries: that somewhere out there, a door will open, and a new country will make room.

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“Into My Heart an Air That Kills”

A.E. Housman, 1896

Into my heart an air that kills
From yon far country blows:
What are those blue remembered hills,
What spires, what farms are those?

Homesickness distilled into four lines. Housman calls it the ‘land of lost content’ — the home you can see shining in memory but cannot return to, at least not as it was. Anyone who has built a life in a new country knows this ache: the far country that blows, unbidden, straight into the heart.

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“Home”

Edgar Guest, 1916

It takes a heap o’ livin’ in a house t’ make it home,
A heap o’ sun an’ shadder, an’ ye sometimes have t’ roam
Afore ye really ’preciate the things ye lef’ behind,
An’ hunger fer ’em somehow, with ’em allus on yer mind.

Guest’s comfort is that a home isn’t made in a day, or by a deed of sale. It’s the slow accumulation of ordinary living — the sun and the shadow, the roaming and the missing — wherever in the world you happen to have landed. Give the new place time, and it becomes home too.

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Quotes & Prose

Quotes about home and away to keep

A few lines short enough to hold onto, from people who knew what it is to love and belong in more than one place.

You will never be completely at home again, because part of your heart will always be elsewhere. That is the price you pay for the richness of loving and knowing people in more than one place.

Miriam Adeney

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Home is not just the place where you happen to be born. It is the place where you become yourself.

Pico Iyer

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If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast.

Ernest Hemingway

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You are only free when you realize you belong no place — you belong every place — no place at all.

Maya Angelou

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Making a home in a new country is slow work. It happens in small things: the day the market stops feeling foreign, the first dream you have in the new language, the moment a stranger becomes a neighbour.

Georgia Clare

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From Georgia

Pause here, if you need to

A short practice for the days a new country feels lonely, whenever you need somewhere gentler to land.

Fear or Intuition: Trusting Your Inner Yes

A short talk by Georgia Clare

A short talk on telling fear from intuition, and learning to trust your own quiet yes.

Listen Now For Free

The 21-Day Meditation Course

Guided Meditation Course · Georgia Clare

Three weeks of short, guided meditations to help you build a calm, steady daily practice — gently softening how you meet stress, anxiety and overwhelm, one day at a time.

Start the 21-Day Course →

The Inner Peace Toolkit

Digital Self-Care Toolkit · Georgia Clare

2 guided meditations, an Inner Peace Journal, an affirmations eBook, 10 printable affirmation prints and 10 calming phone wallpapers — small daily practices to come back to whenever you need to slow down and reconnect with yourself.

Explore the Toolkit →

Questions people ask

Reading for Moving Abroad

Where should I start?

For the emotional truth of it, begin with Sarah Turnbull’s Almost French, which is honest about the loneliness as well as the joy. For something sunnier, Helen Russell’s The Year of Living Danishly. And if a whole book is too much today, the poems below take only a minute.

I’m excited to move but also grieving the life I’m leaving. Is that normal?

Completely, and it’s the thing nobody quite prepares you for. Moving abroad is genuinely two feelings at once — adventure and loss — and they don’t cancel out; they sit side by side. Feeling homesick doesn’t mean you made the wrong choice. It just means you loved what you left.

Which quotes about home and away are worth keeping?

Lines worth keeping include “Home is not just the place where you happen to be born. It is the place where you become yourself.” (Pico Iyer) and Miriam Adeney’s line about part of your heart always being elsewhere. You’ll find more in the quotes section above.

Does it ever really feel like home?

Usually, yes — but slowly, and not in the way you expect. It arrives in small, ordinary moments rather than one grand click of belonging: knowing the shortcuts, dreaming in the language, a neighbour who becomes a friend. Give it time. Home, in the end, is mostly a matter of having lived somewhere long enough.

Moving Abroad

Prescribed reading

For when prose is not enough

Quotes about home and away to keep

Pause here, if you need to

Reading for Moving Abroad

Where should I start?

I’m excited to move but also grieving the life I’m leaving. Is that normal?

Which quotes about home and away are worth keeping?

Does it ever really feel like home?

More prescriptions await.