Assimilation Anxiety

The 2025 Booker Prize Longlist and pulling the ladder up behind you

“It’s that Dad came here, to this country, to make you. And the point of making you was that you would hate him. Good, eh?”

“I don’t hate him.”

“An English gentleman, educated. Someone with taste. Someone who would be ashamed of him.“

Andrew Miller, The Land in Winter

On Monday, David Szalay’s Flesh was announced as the winner of the 2025 Booker Prize. The Booker, which counts among its past winners literary heavyweights such as Kazuo Ishiguro, J. M. Coetzee, and Margaret Atwood, awards £50,000 and enduring prestige to the author of a work of English fiction published in the UK & Ireland. This year’s Longlist features two debut novels, one past winner, Brits, Americans, a Canadian opera librettist. But, for all the diversity in authorship, there was striking thematic convergence on a single tension at the heart of the immigrant experience. Over half of the longlisted novels grapple with the questions: Can one truly assimilate abroad? If so, at what cost?

Rather than tracing the immigration journey, we often meet our characters years after the fact, as their attempts at assimilation are unsettled by the presence of their fellow countrymen. The protagonists sometimes offer kinship, but more often distrust. At a department event, Serk, a Japanese-born professor of Korean descent in Susan Choi’s Flashlight, is introduced to Tae-Min (“Tom”) Lee, a recent arrival to the United States from Seoul. Mr. Lee introduces himself politely; Serk rebuffs him: “I have never stepped foot in Korea. I was born in Japan.” And when a letter bearing Korean stamps appears in Serk’s mailbox, he verbally assaults Mr. Lee, exclaiming “What goddamn shit is this?... I don’t know what the hell you are—some kind of spy—”

The protagonist of Misintepretation, the debut novel from Ledia Xhoga, finds her marriage unraveling as her translation work for fellow Albanian immigrants in New York bleeds into her home life. Fresh from the strange intimacy of translating for dentist appointments and therapy sessions, she is confronted—often on her literal doorstep—with immigration law cases gone awry, shared family traumas, and entanglements with a criminal underworld.

The individual struggle to navigate identity abroad is generations old. Andrew Miller’s The Land in Winter is set in the winter of 1963, the coldest on record in England. Bill Simmons, one of the four central characters, tries his hand at farming in the Somerset countryside. Oxbridge educated, he passes easily for English despite being the son of an Eastern European immigrant. A flashback follows Bill in his childhood, discovering his property magnate father’s certificate of naturalisation which bears the name Somogyi, “He didn’t even tell his brother, Charlie. He was still not sure why. Perhaps it was in case his brother had liked the name and started using it.”

The clearest statement of this theme is found in Kiran Desai’s The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny, a sprawling family saga which follows two young adults searching for love and purpose abroad in America and at home in India. Like a drumbeat throughout the novel, Desai’s male protagonist Sunny iterates on a refrain: “Trying to make it in America by avoiding one another, as if it was better to be one Indian than two Indians, better to be two Indians than three Indians.” This sensitivity is hardly paranoid. Biggs and Knauss, in their 2012 study of 12,000 leaked members of the British National Party (Reform’s ideological forbear), found that “where segregation is low, a large non-white proportion does not increase the probability of [white British adults belonging to the BNP].” By contrast, segregation bolsters BNP support, especially where South Asian or Muslim populations are large. So, diversity drives more liberal attitudes only so long as the “others” are not too concentrated. Better one Indian than two indeed.

Fixation on the “good,” assimilated immigrant undoubtedly reflects the anxieties of our geopolitical moment. Even the UK’s Labour Government, a rare beacon of victory on the left in recent years, has swerved hard to the right on immigration in a bid to woo voters lost to Reform UK (formerly the Brexit Party), threatening to increase residency requirements from 5 to 10 years. Reform would do away with permanent residency entirely. Emboldened by a new Trump presidency, ICE grows increasingly violent. Against this backdrop, the Booker list reveals our preoccupation with how to assimilate without a trace.

The characters ultimately cannot shed their otherness. For some, the project of integration is abandoned by the novel’s end. Sonia & Sunny reconnect in India after her initial attempts to return to America are thwarted by visa application bureaucracy. Szalay’s protagonist returns to Hungary to live out his adult life alone, unable to sustain himself in the UK after a botched interaction with a cabinet minister and the death of his wealthy English wife.

Others seem to integrate by the story’s end only by pulling the ladder up behind them. The narrator of Misinterpretation is stalked by a fellow immigrant. Following the stalker’s disappearance, his Bulgarian girlfriend arrives distressed at the narrator’s apartment. Showing her out, the narrator’s husband threatens: if she comes again, he’ll call immigration.