The Accidental Immigrants

by Jo McMillan

FINALIST FOR THE 2025 ORWELL PRIZE FOR POLITICAL FICTION

What happens when you suddenly find yourself an unwanted foreigner?

Tess and Arlo have made a happy life on St Mira. But the island is not immune to the forces reshaping the world. When a far-right government surges to power, foreigners are their first target. It's time for Tess and Arlo to leave. But what if it's too late?

The Accidental Immigrants is political fiction based on the facts of the years since Brexit: the fallout from the referendum, the rise of the far right, and the increasing xenophobia towards people on the move. Set on an island that's a mirror image of Britain, it's both allegory and warning, and a poignant, prescient tale for our times about the dangers facing us all.

Genres: Fiction

315 pages, Paperback

Published February 20, 2025

About the author

Jo McMillan is the author of three novels. Her first, 'Motherland', won an Arts Council Individual Literature Award and was featured on BBC radio. 'The Happiness Factory' – about men, money and power – draws on the many years Jo lived in China. 'The Accidental Immigrants', Finalist for the 2025 Orwell Prize for Political Fiction, is a story, witnessed first-hand, of the hostile environment spreading across Europe and what it’s like to be caught up in it.

Jo’s writing has appeared in, among others, the Guardian, Granta, Metro, China Review and the Times Higher Education Supplement. She published her PhD as Sex, Science and Morality in China with Routledge.

She has appeared on BBC Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour and on BBC Radio Scotland, at the Leipzig Book Fair, as a guest of Dulwich Books, and at the Wilderness Festival.

Reviews

[Pete · Rating 5 out of 5]

What a superb novel this is. A novel of/for our times. The dangers of where the vile rhetoric from right wing snollygosters like Farage and Braverman etc will lead us to (if it hasn't already).
'It is hard to believe that a beautiful island can turn so ugly and so fast. But it can.'

[Gumble's Yard - Golden Reviewer · Rating 4 out of 5]

But if you look around you... Go on, he said, look around you now..? The camera zoomed in on craned necks, expectant faces. ...you'll see mostly strangers. Maybe a face or two you know, but mostly strangers. And yet these people are not strange to you, are they …… we can instinctively identify Our Own. We just know, don't we, and that's part of human nature ………. But what about the great philosophers, the historians? What do they have to tell us? Here's a definition from the Father of History himself. One: you must be of the same ancestry, share the same blood. 'Two: you must engage in the same religious practices. … 'Three: you must share the same customs. Four: you must share the same language, the so-called native tongue. End of story. Simple. Unarguable. Brilliant, thank you Herodotus. Now, was that hard? Can we all count to four? …. And yet there are people out there who'll tell you what I've just said is racist. Is it? No. Because to be racist you've got to be anti other races. We're not anti anything. We’re pro St Mira …. We’re pro Our Own ….. Fact is: we are loyal and dedicated to our own family, pack, tribe - call it what you will. But we will not be guilt-tripped into caring about abstractions such as "humanity. We are tired of having our heartstrings pulled by vague notions such as "the world"

 
2025 Orwell Prize Finalist
 
And I would say a very appropriate addition to the shortlist – as like Orwell (in both “1984” and “Animal Farm” (*)) it is a dystopian political satire which has as its target current political trends and actions, and despite its near universality as a warning being rooted in a certain Englishness.
 
(*) although given the now German based but Midlands-born author was a Communist party member, who honeymooned in Cuba with her Soviet husband journalist before her then life collapsed with the Berlin Wall one assumes she did not really take that book to heart when younger.

The title of the book and in particular its dedication “For all the people who lose their lives trying to reach a safer shore” initially put me in mind of the 2025 International Booker shortlisted “Small Boat” but in practice the book has much stronger echoes of the 2023 Booker Winner “Prophet Song” – with in some ways a similar concept of white inhabitants of a Western European society suddenly finding themselves engrossed in a tumultuous right-wing environment which leaves them needing to become asylum seekers themselves – the difference being that whereas Prophet Song focused on citizens suddenly facing persecution for their family member’s political beliefs and actions, here the protagonists are suddenly confronted with being seen as immigrants (and unwanted immigrants) in a county in which they have long lived and had assumed they were welcome and appreciated including with strong family ties.
 
In other words this is a book more about legal economic/social migration (or at least previously legal immigration) as much if not more than it is around asylum seekers (although cleverly encompassing both) – and of course (and as the extract from a political speech with which I open my review shows) the book could not be better timed given the UK Prime Minister’s ill-conceived (and likely ill-intentioned) “strangers” speech on immigration.
 
St Mira is a small Island in the Ionian Sea – once an English colony before they “quit the island because the oil had run out” and while independent still host to a military base that the UK accesses.
 
Tess has an English and St Miran passport (as an aside at one point there is a reference to the St Miran football team which then changed my mental pronunciation of Miran).– having had a St Miran grandfather (from a traditional Island family) and half-St Miran mother plus unknown Greek fisherman father.   Having returned to the Island to scatter her grandfather’s ashes and trace her relatives in the island archives, but with no remaining relatives in England she drifted into a job as caretaker at Dover Castle – where she maintained the English lawn and graves – but now has worked for a number of years as translator at the
 
Arlo – her partner of some 12 years – is the outsider of a rich English family, having lost his job as a Skills for Life teacher in Chelsea (after council cutbacks) he moved to St Mira and teaches a Certificate of English and tutors people for the UK Immigration Authorities Life in the UK test at the St Miran UK Cultural Office (StUKCO) – later we find that he has let his UK passport lapse.
 
Some few years before the book is set – in 2016 the two right wing parties on the Island (National Conservatives and St Miran Patriots) merged to form the Firsters – St Miran First Party – whose charismatic leader indulges in ever more inflammatory nationalistic and anti-immigrant (including and even specifically UK immigrants), pro St Mira exceptionalism, pro Greek language rhetoric. 
And when, as the book opens, an unattributed bomb apparently kills a mother and her baby (the two being the image of the Island together with its St George like flag which itself has its origins in a birth myth) definitively tips the balance of the general election sweeping the Firster to power with their leader who issue a string of executive orders in an almost Trump like mania (but with a much more coherent set of objectives and without his tendency to back down on his initial rhetoric).  Soon the English language is outlawed, St Miran nationality is stripped from natives (leaving Arlo effectively stateless) and then attention turns to those seen as foreign collaborators or otherwise conflicted (including Tess) With the English government (including an independent conflict advisor who was an ex-lover of Tess but now places his career ahead of her fate) more interested in real-politik than in the fate of part-English people left in St Mira (and unwilling to grant refuge given their own anti-asylum rhetoric) – Tess and Arlo find themselves in limbo – and an increasingly difficult one as both vigilante and government  actions make life increasingly impossible for them.
 
Two devices add to the book’s effectiveness
 
First the chapters are both effectively cleverly interleaved with hand printed answers to questions from a (real) UK Immigration form – answers we quickly from Tess although the exact circumstances in which she ends up in front of the UK immigration authorities (which include: a faked hanging, a double-cross by a claimed saviour which leads to a loss and gain of a passport, and a reverse-blackmail) reveals more slowly.
 
Second many of the speeches (including the one in which I opened my review), quotes or incidents in the novel are drawn from real life (almost all from English politicians or right-wing organisations) in a way which is rarely artificial and mainly effective in reinforcing the book’s relevance and topicality.

And with this played against a deeply drawn set of characters – not just the often conflicted Tess and the increasingly despairing Arlo but also a small group of other friends and colleagues caught up in the events – this ends as an impressive novel, one less polemical than I might have feared from some interviews I listened to with the author, and all the more effective for it.
 
A strong candidate to win the prize from a high quality Finalist list.

[Vanessa · Rating 3 out of 5]

The Accidental Immigrants follows Tess and Arlo, two Brits who have settled on the fictional island of St. Mira. A far right government comes into power and completely upheaves their lives, forcing them to find a way to return to England.
I thought this book was fine. I wasn’t sure what the benefit of creating this fictional immigration narrative was - there are plenty of more true-to-life stories worth telling, especially in light of conservative ideologies gaining traction in Europe.
The book also barely glossed over important discussion of identity and belonging. I don’t feel like I know anything about Arlo and Tess. The only more fleshed-out character was their neighbor Vera who came with a meaningful backstory and complex feelings around love and grief.

[Daren Kearl · Rating 5 out of 5]

Dedicated to all the people who lose their lives trying to reach a safer shore, The Accidental Immigrants is about the slow changes of a country from far right election to blatant fascism, where rights and freedoms are gradually taken away, leaving those that are not deemed pure blood, or true citizens, as scapegoats; figures for focusing hate.
It also contemplates who we are. What makes us belong to a country and call it home?
It’s a slow burn with interesting characters and that Adriatic, diplomatic feel reminiscent of Olivia Manning.

[Rose · Rating 3 out of 5]

I feel like this book was reaching to be Prophet Song but ended up like The Dream Hotel - a book that grapples with a current real-world crisis in a new and thought-provoking way, which it does, but somehow it didn't really click as a story. It didn't have whatever that ineffable quality is that compels you to keep reading, just one more chapter, even though you know you'll regret it in the morning. I wish I could put my finger on why but this quality was missing for me in this one.

[Lorna Harrison · Rating 3 out of 5]

Actual 3.5

A novel about what might happen if the far right got elected. Set on a fictional island in the Mediterranean it follows Tess and Arlo as they become people with no state. Scarily alot of the quotes are based on actual things said by a variety of people - not just Mr Farage but the British Government as well.

Predictably neighbours turn on neighbours and secrets abound. The plot isn't particularly novel or imaginative but it is well done and a reminder of what might happen.

Well written and all the characters are believable. A decent first novel published by an independent publishing house.