With more than 100 million people currently forced from their homes by war or persecution and estimates that a billion more could be displaced by climate change by mid-century, migration and refugees will be pressing issues for the world into the future.

To help people understand what underpins what is an emotive and complicated issue, iMPACT Magazine is recommending some great books that delve into the contexts, drivers and effects of mass migration.

The Aeneid (Virgil)

One of the great epics about migrants, with themes that resonate as much now as they did 2000 years ago.

Aeneas is a refugee who flees war in what is now Turkey, and criss-crosses the Mediterranean before settling in Rome.

The first six of the poem’s twelve books tell the story of Aeneas’ wanderings from Troy to Italy, and the poem’s second half tells of the Trojans’ ultimately victorious war upon the Latins (early Romans) under whose name Aeneas and his Trojan followers are destined to be subsumed.

The hero Aeneas was already known to Greco-Roman legend and myth, having been a character in the Iliad.

There’s a new translation called The Aeneid by Shadi Bartsch.  

A Bear Called Paddington (Michael Bond)

The children’s favourite story of Paddington Bear can be read as the tale of an undocumented child migrant from Peru. Paddington turns up at a certain railway station in the 1950s, claiming to have got there by lifeboat. And his real name, Pastuso, is too difficult for Londoners to pronounce.

Michael Bond based Paddington Bear on a lone teddy bear that he noticed on a shelf in a London shop near Paddington Station on Christmas Eve 1956, which he bought as a present for his wife

He was inspired by the sight, during World War II, of Jewish refugee children from Europe arriving in Britain and of London children being evacuated to the countryside, the evacuees bearing labels perhaps similar to that attached to the bear Paddington “Please look after this bear”.

Across the Seas: Australia’s response to refugees, a history (Klaus Neumann)

In this eloquent and informative book, historian Klaus Neumann examines both government policy and public attitudes towards refugees and asylum seekers since Federation.

He places the Australian story in the context of global refugee movements, and international responses to them. Neumann examines many case studies, including the resettlement of displaced persons from European refugee camps in the late 1940s and early 1950s, and the panic generated by the arrival of Vietnamese asylum seekers during the 1977 federal election campaign.

By exploring the ways in which politicians have approached asylum-seeker issues in the past, Neumann aims to inspire more creative thinking about current refugee and asylum-seeker policy.

On Savage Shores: How Indigenous Americans Discovered Europe (Caroline Dodds Pennock)

An exemplary work of recent non-fiction that retells the stories of Native Americans who came to Europe in the wake of the European conquest.

Dodds Pennock writes about tens of thousands of Aztecs, Maya, Totonacs, Inuit and others – enslaved people, diplomats, explorers, servants, traders – who went to Europe. For them, Europe comprised savage shores, a land of riches and marvels, yet perplexing for its brutal disparities of wealth and quality of life, and its baffling beliefs.

The story of these Indigenous Americans abroad is a story of abduction, loss, cultural appropriation, and, as they saw it, of apocalypse – a story that has largely been absent from our collective imagination of the times.

From the Brazilian king who met Henry VIII to the Aztecs who mocked up human sacrifice at the court of Charles V; from the Inuk baby who was put on show in a London pub to the mestizo children of Spaniards who returned ‘home’ with their fathers; from the Inuit who harpooned ducks on the Avon river to the many servants employed by Europeans of every rank: here are a people who were rendered exotic, demeaned, and marginalised, but whose worldviews and cultures had a profound impact on European civilisation.

The Art of Losing (Alice Zeniter)

A superb and underrated multi-generational novel about an extended Algerian family, set in Algeria and France from the 1950s to the present.

Spanning three generations across seventy years, Alice Zeniter’s The Art of Losing tells the story of how people carry on in the face of loss: the loss of a country, an identity, a way to speak to your children. It’s a story of colonization and immigration, and how in some ways, we are a product of the things we’ve left behind.

Homecoming: Voices of the Windrush generation (Colin Grant)

A well-crafted and deeply moving compilation of first-person accounts by Caribbean migrants who came to the UK between the 1940s and ’60s.

The book draws on over a hundred first-hand interviews, archival recordings and memoirs by the women and men who came to Britain from the West Indies between the late 1940s and the early 1960s.

In their own words, they tell of the transition from the optimism of the first post-war arrivals to the race riots of the late 1950s.

Readers hear from nurses in Manchester; bus drivers in Bristol; seamstresses in Birmingham; teachers in Croydon; dockers in Cardiff; inter-racial lovers in High Wycombe, and Carnival Queens in Leeds. These are stories of hope and regret, of triumphs and challenges, brimming with humour, anger and wisdom. Together, they reveal a rich tapestry of Caribbean British lives.

The book is an unforgettable portrait of a generation, which brilliantly illuminates an essential and much-misunderstood chapter of British history.

Not Quite Australian: How temporary migration is changing the nation (Peter Mares)

Not Quite Australian is packed with fresh insight and challenging new ideas for understanding Australia’s growing culture of temporary migration.

Permanent migration has long been vital to the story of Australia. From the arrival of early settlers to waves of post-war immigration, the symbolic moment of disembarking onto Australian soil is an image deeply embedded in our nation’s consciousness.

Today, there are more than million temporary migrants living in Australia. They work, pay tax and abide by our laws, yet they remain unrecognised as citizens. All the while, this rise in temporary migration is redefining Australian society, from wage wars and healthcare benefits, to broader ideas of national identity and cultural diversity.

In Not Quite Australian, award-winning journalist Peter Mares draws on case studies, interviews and personal stories to investigate the complex realities of this new era of temporary migration. Mares considers such issues as the expansion of the 457 work visa, the unique experience of New Zealand migrants, the internationalisation of Australia’s education system and our highly politicised asylum-seeker policies to draw conclusions about our nation’s changing landscape.

The Next Great Migration (Sonia Shah)

‘The Next Great Migration’ upends our centuries-long assumptions about migration. It is a journey through science, history and reporting; and it predicts the lifesaving power of migration in the face of climate change.

Shah says that for too long, we’ve suppressed the fact of the migration instinct, demonising it as a harbinger of terror. We’ve constructed a story about ourselves, our history, our bodies, and the natural world around us in which migration is the anomaly. It’s an illusion. And once it falls, the entire world shifts.

She argues that far from being a disruptive behaviour to be resisted, migration is an ancient and lifesaving response to environmental change; a biological imperative as necessary as breathing.

City of Refugees (Susan Hartman)

The book tells the inspirational story of three refugees who helped to rescue the dying rust-bucket town of Utica in upstate New York.

In the mid-1800s, Utica, NY had a larger population than Detroit, Cleveland or Chicago. The size of the town reached 100,000 in the 1930s but then began decline that saw it drop to 60,000 in 2000.

The town turned corner after that, revitalising its city centre largely thanks to the presence of refugees. Many of the refugees who settled in Utica came from war-torn homelands such as Vietnam, Burma, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Somalia or Iraq.

Nomad Century: How to survive the climate upheaval (Gaia Vince)

In the global south, extreme climate change will push vast numbers of people from their homes, with large regions becoming uninhabitable; in the developed world, economies will struggle to survive demographic changes with massive workforce shortages and an impoverished elderly population.

This is the unprecedented upheaval that will reshape the planet that is described in the new book.

British-Australian environmental writer Gaia Vince, posits that over the next fifty years, hotter temperatures combined with more intense humidity are set to make large areas of the globe uninhabitable, potentially displacing 3.5 billion people.

The book says people will be forced to flee the tropics, coastal areas and once arable lands to seek new homes.

Refugee Stories / Refugee Heroes (Laurie Nowell)

These two companion books tell the inspirational and heart-wrenching stories of refugees who have found safety and new a life in Australia are told in compelling, first-hand detail in a new book.

The books have collected the visceral and often hair-raising accounts of dozens of refugees who have fled conflict or persecution and begun new lives in Australia.

From Afghanistan, Ukraine Myanmar, Tibet, Syria, Iraq, Syria, Iraq and beyond the book recounts the deeply human journeys of people who have had to flee their homes; and it reveals their hopes and dreams for their futures.