This paper connects three related issues in Phillips’s fiction: rights, routes, and ruptures. Rights are generally (if implicitly) conceived through a sense of location. They accrue to citizens of a country, or within certain spaces, whether territorial, social, or personal. Similarly, there are protocols of what happens to rights across borders. But what happens to rights when location is interrupted at levels below and beyond the mappings of the visible? This is the territory of Phillips’s fictional world, and I will consider two of his novels, The Nature of Blood and A Distant Shore, in this light. In each novel there are characters whose routes through time and space are broken rather than fluid and uninterrupted. We hear their voices, mapping these versions of dislocation. Whereas we are used to the conceptual opposition between ‘roots’ and ‘routes’, here we see oscillations and antinomies built into the very concept of ‘route’ itself—profoundly important in a migrant world. In this context, it is hard to conceive of full ‘rights’ until ‘routes’ are understood in their ruptures and silences. Phillips’s work offers a crucial prologue to any full conception of rights in a transnational setting.