This Land is our Land: An Immigrant’s Manifesto
SUKETU MEHTA
(JONATHAN CAPE, 304 PP, £14.99)
Tablet bookshop price £13.49 • Tel 020 7799 4064

Indian-born Suketu Mehta begins his bold immigrant’s manifesto with the memory of his grandfather speaking to an elderly British man in London: “You took all our wealth, our diamonds,” his grandfather said. “Now we have come to collect.” In other words, the immigrants are here, in the developed countries, to take back what is rightfully theirs. It is impossible to quantify the reparations demanded by colonial history, but credit to Mehta for his relentless pursuit of harrowing facts.

Colonialism is the key issue here, its fingerprints marking the entire globe, setting in motion the global immigration crisis, anchored in wealth inequality, the plutocracy of the United States, climate change, the devastating carbon footprint left by multinationals, and war, or what happens when a partition instantaneously splits a country in two.