Jo McMillan
@jomcmillan.bsky.social
415 followers 188 following 334 posts
Fan of alphabets and characters - complex and simplified. Have called Beijing, Melaka and London home. Looking for Utopia. Currently in Berlin.
Fan of alphabets and characters - complex and simplified. Have called Beijing, Melaka and London home. Looking for Utopia. Currently in Berlin.
![The Accidental Immigrants
By Jo McMillan
Bluemoose Books, £10.99
Writing political fiction is always something of a gamble; writing a political novel about the rise of the far right, which takes as its backdrop the years since Brexit, is even riskier. These are urgent themes, but their immediacy can threaten the imaginative work of a novel. The Accidental Immigrants, however, is no generalising parable. The novel, set on the fictional island of St Mira, is attuned to the insidiousness of xenophobia, the suspicion of “foreign accents”, the “rage that year after year had been thumbed on a whim into phones”. Its plot reveals how quickly this can wreak havoc on the most ordinary patterns of everyday life, how ‘History’ itself ‘depend[s] on who you ask’. Philippa Conlon](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:2eibdf4oppyausdve6rf2ngi/bafkreigfmfq5c63kt6ianmeeaa2vatjnxux33pm5gdi5pyodtmmtmt3dze)
