In March, we introduced a new service: the Reading Doctor. Read more about Dr Louise here. Send us your questions for her by emailing us: communications@read-nz.org

I'm moving house and to ease the general stress involved in the process, am currently in search of novels that speak to the idea of moving from one place to another. What does the Reading Doctor recommend?

From one place to another

As populations and people move around the globe, whether by choice, necessity or desperation, where you’ve come from and where you’re going are defining. These books tell stories about those who’ve made a move from one place to another.

· A young Irish girl leaves her home and family to move from Ireland to Brooklyn in search of work in the 1950s, in the novel by Colm Tóibín.

· When people move, they take their religion with them, in American Gods by Neil Gaiman, in which transplanted deities must also learn to coexist with each other in the New World.

· In Gould’s Book of Fish by Richard Flanagan, a convict transported to a violent Tasmanian penal colony in the 19^th-century is tasked with painting fish for a taxonomy project.

· Lev travels from Eastern Europe to London in Rose Tremain’s award-winning novel The Road Home, seeking work which will support the mother, daughter and best friend he leaves behind.

· A woman from Africa seeks her child in Hand Me Down World by Lloyd Jones, relying on strangers as she journeys across Europe, finding both kindness and betrayal.

· Wellington is a long way from Europe for migrants in Maurice Gee’s Live Bodies, until the war brings foreign politics and prejudices directly to New Zealand shores.

· A young couple fall in love as war breaks out around them, when they hear rumours of doors appearing in the city which are portals to a new life elsewhere, in Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West.

· In the aftermath of the Vietnam War, a North Vietnamese mole in the South Vietnamese army remains embedded in the immigrant community in exile in the United States, in The Sympathizer by Viet Than Nguyen.

· The diaspora of Jamaican immigrants escaping economic hardship after WWII is the subject of Andrea Levy’s Small Island, in which the Mother Country extends a less than warm welcome to those who fought in her name.

· Patricia Grace tells a multi-generational saga of a family spread around the globe in Chappy, who nevertheless share a history and a heritage and a desire to belong.