Two books explore the plight of migrants to the UK from Windrush onwards

Homecoming: Voices of the Windrush Generation
COLIN GRANT
(Jonathan Cape, 320 PP, £18.99)
Tablet bookshop price £17.99 • Tel 020 7799 4064

The Unsettling of Europe: The Great Migration, 1945 to the Present
PETER GATRELL
(Allen Lane, 576 PP, £30)
Tablet bookshop price £27 • Tel 020 7799 4064

One of the great, unsung studies of post-war migration is Journey to an Illusion: The West Indian in Britain by Donald Hinds, a Jamaica-born writer and former London bus conductor. Published in 1966, his book sympathetically conveys the plight of migrants from the anglophone Caribbean who, lost amid alien signs in the “mother country”, tried to settle and earn a crust. The book provides a model for the social historian Colin Grant, whose own superb oral history of West Indian migration, Homecoming, is in many ways a continuation of Journey to an Illusion. Interspersed with social commentary and pages of sprightly autobiography (Grant was raised by Jamaican parents in 1960s Bedfordshire), the book draws on over 100 interviews with teachers, cricketers, film-makers, hairdressers, writers and machinists who came to the UK from the Caribbean in a response to a recruitment drive. Not all had intended to remain “in foreign”, they tell Grant, but gradually it dawned on them that they were here to stay.