The Migrants

Christopher de Hamel is one of the world’s best-known scholars and writers on illuminated manuscripts. This book magically recalls his childhood discovery of manuscripts growing up in remote New Zealand – an evocation of the thrill and wonder of that first, life-changing encounter – and about the history of empire and colonisation at the world’s last frontier.

The Migrants explores the meeting and creation of cultures, the necessity of collecting and the nature of authenticity, the importance of history in the last nation ever settled by humans, and, above all, the migration of people, art and heritage. We meet the colonial governor on his paradise island, the shipwrecked accountant, the evangelical nonagenarian who cut up manuscripts, the drug-addled magnate who bought Becket’s Boethius, and the mischievous settler who inscribed his Book of Hours in the Maori language in 1842. We travel with the author now back to where the manuscripts were made, from Besançon in eastern France to Poland and Canterbury, revealing their first owners and following the longest journeys ever undertaken by people or books.

This is a coming-of-age saga with extraordinary twists, crossing many hundreds of years and tens of thousands of miles, recounted with passion, humour and a lifetime’s reflection.