According to the colon woman, newly fled from Algeria: "You take a sapling and replant it, and it thrives. But an old tree like me, a tree with roots-out of its own soil that tree will die." These four portraits evoke the lives of migrant workers, refugees, all sorts of forced wanderers in Europe: exemplars, finely studied and recorded, of transplants who neither thrive nor perish. A splendid collection, the product of a fine eye and ear and of an energetic style that but occasionally strays to the artful. Easy to read and difficult to forget.
