Critic Jopi Nyman argues that Pilgrims Way, like Gurnah's novels By the Sea (2001) and Desertion (2005), evinces "an interest in the structures of feeling generated by migration and exile".[11] Maria Jesus Cabarcos Traseira reads Pilgrims Way as a pastoral in which Daud is "transformed" through "moments of harmony with nature".[12] Critics Ann Blake, Leela Gandhi, and Sue Thomas, comparing Pilgrims Way to Dottie and Admiring Silence (1996), state that Pilgrims Way "take[s] up the damaging day to day experiences of migration and black Britishness".[13]