Moving Abroad

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.

In Other Words

Jhumpa Lahiri · 2016

Lahiri moved to Rome and stopped writing in English, and this book — composed in Italian and printed with the original alongside the translation — is her account of what that did to her. It is the best thing there is on the strangest part of moving abroad: becoming, in a new language, a blunter and simpler version of yourself, and having to decide whether that person is a loss or a beginning.

Brooklyn

Colm Tóibín · 2009

Eilis Lacey leaves Enniscorthy for New York in the 1950s because there is nothing for her at home, and Tóibín writes the homesickness so plainly it is almost hard to read: the letters, the boarding house, the flatness of a life she did not choose. Then she builds something, and then Ireland calls her back, and she has to decide. The best novel there is about the particular trap of ending up with two homes and being fully at ease in neither.