This summer has been full of angry, broad-brush commentary about asylum and immigration in the UK media, and it feels like this will only ramp up as autumn comes round. It felt refreshing to read a novel that set those debates aside and instead turned its gaze to the lived experiences of individuals whose lives take them between different countries.

Naudé’s book follows Jaco, a middle-aged gay man, as he oscillates between Europe and South Africa, reckoning with his father’s approaching death and his own unsettled existence. Around him, he encounters a range of other ‘fugitives’: migrants, artists, lovers, all navigating the dislocation of living between cultures. Of course, Naudé presents these people as textured, complicated individuals rather than as the faceless homogenous ‘migrant masses’ so often conjured by political rhetoric.

I sometimes warmed to Jaco and sometimes felt distanced from him. At moments he felt like a character to root for, while at others he’s more of a lens than a companion. Perhaps that’s intentional: Naudé isn’t writing a simple psychological portrait, but a book about movement and fracture, including within families. I hadn’t previously given much thought to how ties can splinter when relatives live under different societal cultures and expectations; this book made me think harder about that.

The strand that will linger with me is the subplot of a sick child taken from South Africa to New York for experimental treatment. The hope, the weight of expectations, and the inevitability of disappointment echoed other parts of the book, and left me reflecting on how we load our own dreams onto others, sometimes unfairly. It was a moving and troubling seam in a novel already rich with them.

The prose style didn’t particularly draw attention to itself. In many ways that felt right: it’s the characters and their displacement, rather than the language itself, that stay with me.

Overall, I found Fathers and Fugitives absorbing, timely, and quietly thought-provoking. In a season when immigration is a political football, it was refreshing to spend time with a book that insists on the messiness and individuality of people’s lives.