Jenny Erpenbeck’s heartfelt and thought-provoking novel, Go, Went, Gone, leads the reader to pull back the curtain on the refugee situation and honestly contemplate this global crisis. As the protagonist, Richard, a retired Professor of Classical Philology has time to notice and investigate the situation near his home, he discovers and unveils the hardships and dreams of a small band of refugees who are seeking asylum in Germany.

Over the last decade, migration has become an urgent political issue. The 2010s were marked not only by the global movement of people across national borders but by government attempts to erect walls and fences in their path. The 2010s also saw a higher number of people from southern countries move towards the north. In particular, Europe received hundreds of thousands of people fleeing chronic poverty, political instability, wars, and the climate crisis in Africa, the Middle East and south Asia, countries that are often laid to ruin by western-backed institutions.

Libya has always been the migratory destination for many sub-Saharan Africans because of its employment opportunities, but following the suppression of the 2011 Arab uprising, and NATO’s intervention in Libya, a lawless society emerged and racial hatred against sub-Saharan Africans was unleashed. Many escaped forced labour and torture, climbing into dinghies and beginning their dangerous sea journey across the central Mediterranean. But landing in Europe, they didn’t come to safety. Instead, they found themselves in the centre of a white, Eurocentric discourse, where they were considered a ‘problem’ to be blamed for society’s ills. ‘Flow’, ‘flood’ and ‘crisis’; media imagery and language shaped public opinion, rising nationalism won votes, and the far-right worldview mainstreamed.

Entwined within this general wave of migration was a rare event: Muammar Gaddafi sent 100,000 African migrants to Europe. Gaddafi was following his own threat of switching back on the tap of illegal entrants in retaliation for NATO’s backing the rebels and bombing his forces. Pressed by the Mukhabarat, Libya’s dreaded secret police, Mustafa Fauzi, a convicted people smuggler, was told it was his patriotic duty to join other people-smuggling gangs who were encouraged to carry out the mass evictions. The result was a tide of men and women, infants and the elderly, being shipped across the Mediterranean in leaky boats, and the tragic washing up on Europe’s southern shores of dozens of dead bodies.

Erpenbeck’s novel sits among other refugee stories, such as The Girl Who Smiled Beads by Clemantine Wamariya and Elizabeth Weil, and Sea Prayer by Khaled Hosseini, as an insightful window into the lives of the vulnerable and invisible.