Scattered

Longlisted for the Bread & Roses Award 2025

A Guardian book to look out for in 2024

'An exceptional book: a meditation on family; an interrogation of movement and borders; a reflection on how someone can become separated from their own personal history; and an argument that it is never too late to reconnect with what was lost' — SALLY HAYDEN

‘A compelling story from a gifted storyteller … In a moment where refugees are often talked about but rarely heard from, her voice breaks through’ — GARY YOUNGE

A staggering investigation into the costs and consequences of displacement, from a young woman uniquely placed to explore the refugee experience and its aftershocks

In 2015, Aamna Mohdin travelled to Calais to report from the frontlines of the refugee crisis. When she returned to London, and discussed what she had seen with her parents, their response surprised her: didn’t she remember being a refugee herself?

Aamna was faced with a reality she had been outrunning for nearly two decades: that her parents had been refugees of the Somali civil war; and that her arrival in the UK aged seven had been preceded by an early childhood in a refugee camp, followed by years of displacement and desperation — as her family, sometimes together but often separated, fought for a place to call home.

For the first time, Aamna’s parents told her their story: of the lives they had built in the newly independent Somalia, and the shattering effects of civil war that followed. From London, she travelled to Somalia, a homecoming to a place that had never been home; before retracing her parents’ flight to Kenya, and the Kakuma refugee camp — the site of a very present refugee crisis, now three decades in the making.

Scattered is a staggering investigation into the costs and consequences of displacement, from a young woman uniquely placed to explore the refugee experience and its aftershocks. A powerful reportage, it is also an epic story of returns and reunions; and a joyful celebration of family and belonging.

‘The only way out of the crisis of exclusion sweeping across the Atlantic Ocean is storytelling … In so luminously recounting the story of her family Mohdin achieves an imaginative breakthrough that everyone should read’ — SAMUEL MOYN, Professor of Law and History at Yale University