What do we leave behind when we move to a new place – and what do we carry with us, physically and emotionally, wherever we land? 

Here are the voices of people who have come to Britain to make a new life: the Czech-Roma lawyer in Reading, the Iranian taxi driver in Shropshire, the Sierra Leonean actor in Northampton, the Romanian police officer in Edinburgh.

Colin Grant has travelled the country and listened to their stories – foundational tales of arriving in a new land, along with rarely spoken stories of love and loss. Together, these accounts ask questions about assimilation, identity, the emotional cost of migration and belonging in twenty-first-century Britain.

Candid, profoundly human, sometimes funny and always moving, What We Leave We Carry is a chance to listen to Britain – in all its richness and complexity.

Author: Colin Grant

British & Irish history

Published on 4 June 2026 by Vintage Publishing (Jonathan Cape) in the United Kingdom.

Hardback | 320 pages
240 x 156 | 750g