Travellers starts with a bored academic, marooned in Berlin, who befriends a young man who his artist wife rejects as a model. Each chapter could be read as a self-contained short story, but it become clear that the characters in each are linked together. The tales that are revealed are at times painful, harrowing and heartbreaking, and I found the book increasingly hard to put down.
Travellers is an absorbing and compelling insight into the lives of some of the people fleeing from conflict, at the mercy of people smugglers and the right paperwork.

I really like Habila, his work is beautifully written and powerful. His last short book was non-fiction about the Chibok girls and was hard reading, but this fictionalised account of the refugee crisis I found really difficult to take and read in small chunks. I think partly because I have sat with guys (and families) who have been through some of what is described here, and they made it, and I somehow tell myself that as a way of living with it. But this book puts all of the pain front and centre: people losing each other, dealing with racism, poverty, endless waiting. Linking the stories is a Nigerian expat in Berlin, relatively well off, with a visa. He encounters his first refugees as a chance meeting, and then is drawn into individual stories. The book hammers home that this is not a crisis "over there" but is woven into everyday life now in Europe, from the Italian town sinking under the weight of migrant arrivals to the deportation trains crossing Germany to return people to the African coast. Unlike in [Spring], resistance of the ordinary people to the state's choices appears futile.

"Have you ever been on a refugee boat? Pray you never do. Pray your country never breaks up into civil strife and war, that you are never chased out of your home. The boat was really nothing but a death trap, an old, rickety fishing trawler that should have been retired a long time ago. Because we paid five thousand each we got to sit on the upper deck where we could get a bit of fresh air. Some, who were down below in the hold, stacked on top of each other, died within hours of our departure— the children and the pregnant women died first. We saw them bring up the bodies and throw them in the water. Our engine was on fire, the captain wanted to turn back, but we begged him to go on. We would rather die in the water than go back. There was nothing to go back to.