This month on the reading group we’re going to celebrate migration. It makes us richer, it makes us stronger, it makes our world more colourful and more interesting.

All of which goes some of the way to explaining why migration is also such a good source of literature. But there are also the tales of hardship and opportunity, stories of personal bravery, risk, cruelties and ignorance. It’s of such stuff that great novels are built, so I’m hoping we can compile an epic list of world-class literature.

It may actually be harder to name writers from the past who didn’t move around or write about being abroad, or who are not resettled today. Virgil’s Aeneas migrates from Troy to Italy. Chaucer may have kept things closer to his home in the Canterbury Tales, but he was inspired to write his travels around continental Europe. Shakespeare was forever writing about the experiences of people such as Othello and Shylock, who were treated as foreigners in their own homes, not to mention Brits abroad such as Henry V.

While we’re on Brits abroad, wandering UK citizens may often like to call themselves “expats”, but they too are migrants – so there are books such as Jan Morris’s Trieste, Gerald Durrell’s My Family and Other Animals, Lawrence Durrell’s The Black Book or even George Orwell’s Burmese Days.

There’s also a rich tradition of post-second world war migration literature in the UK to consider. Last year we looked at the amazing work the Windrush generation produced – but that shouldn’t discourage us from revisiting it. And there are also the novels of writers such as Bernardine Evaristo, Salman Rushdie, Hanif Kureishi and Zadie Smith, about more recent migration.

Of course – and I hope this isn’t too shocking a revelation – the UK isn’t the only place where migration occurs. There’s a whole world of candidates out there: Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, Khushwant Singh’s Train to Pakistan, Michael Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, Jeffrey Eugenides’s Middlesex, Juno Díaz’s The Brief, Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Jhumpa Lahiri’s Unaccustomed Earth, Amy Tan’s Joy Luck Club. Even Lolita has been described as a work of migrant literature. (Nabokov certainly wrote it a long way from his original home.) We haven’t even got to works translated from other languages …

We’ll keep this nomination process running until Sunday. Once we have a list, I’ll print it out the titles, put them in a hat and the one that comes out will be our Reading group choice for August. I’m looking forward to seeing what emerges.

So get to it! The world is your oyster.