Belonging

Sarah Moss is a prolific and vital novelist whose books encompass an array of subjects from Victorian social reform and 19th-century Japan to broken Brexit Britain and eating disorders. She combines teaching at University College, Dublin with writing in real time: The Fell, set during the second lockdown, came out in the summer of 2021, while My Good Bright Wolf, an experimental memoir about her anorexic breakdown in late 2020, was published last year. A forthcoming Channel 4 adaptation of Summerwater, which explored national identity and isolation against the backdrop of a soggy Scottish holiday park, may catapult her into the sort of gold-foil territory enjoyed by Maggie O’Farrell or

A friend recently moved back to the UK after living in China for ten years. Being English, he was always going to be an outsider in China, but what surprises him now is how foreign he feels in England too. He asked me whether this feeling ever ended. I told him that I suspect people like us will never fully belong anywhere again. The novelist and filmmaker Xiaolu Guo articulates this sense of alienation exquisitely, knowing exactly what it’s like: ‘Part of me is always in exile.’ She left China in her late twenties when she was already a published author. In Radical, she tries to come to terms with

In the summer of 2019, the journalist Anita Sethi was on a train travelling across northern England when she was racially abused by another passenger. Besides using several words too offensive to quote, the man spat that Sethi should go back to where she came from. And so she did. Sethi comes from Manchester. Her first reaction to the experience was to speak out, to alert a member of staff and to ensure her abuser faced justice; her second was to start planning a trek across northern England, the landscape that was hers and where she belonged. Following old existing tracks and forging new ones of her own, she travelled