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One September afternoon, Yosef and Mariam, Ethiopian immigrants who have spent all but their first year of marriage apart, set off on a road trip from their home in Peoria, Illinois, to Nashville, Tennessee, in search of a new identity as an American couple. Months later, their son, Jonas, is born in Illinois. Thirty years later, Yosef has died, and Jonas is desperate to make sense of the volatile generational and cultural ties that have forged him....
2) The namesake
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NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER. Pulitzer Prize winner Jhumpa Lahiri brilliantly illuminates the immigrant experience and the tangled ties between generations. Namesake is a fine-tuned, intimate, and deeply felt novel of identity from "a writer of uncommon elegance and poise." (The New York Times)
Meet the Ganguli family, new arrivals from Calcutta, trying their best to become Americans even as they pine for home. The name they...
Meet the Ganguli family, new arrivals from Calcutta, trying their best to become Americans even as they pine for home. The name they...
3) Bread givers
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"The youngest of four daughters in a family that left Poland in the 1920s for the crowded tenements of New York City's Lower East Side, Sara Smolinsky has seen her sisters resign themselves under their rabbi father's iron fist to loveless marriages and empty futures. They are bread givers, working to feed the family while their father studies the Torah--according to which, as their father reminds them, a woman without her father or husband is less...
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It's been fifty years since Antonio Grasso married Maddalena and brought her to America. That was the last time she saw her parents, her sisters and brothers-everything she knew and loved in the village of Santa Cecilia, Italy. Maddalena sees no need to open the door to the past and let the emotional baggage and unmended rifts of another life spill out.
But Prima was raised on the lore of the Old Country. And as she sees her parents aging, she...
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Patricia Engel's collection of stories, Vida, quickly established her as one of our country's best young writers, winning praise from Junot Díaz, Uzodinma Iweala, Francisco Goldman, and others. Her first novel is a vibrant and wistful narrative about an American girl abroad in Paris, who navigates the intoxicating and treacherous complexities of independence, friendship, and romance. Lita del Cielo, the daughter of two Colombian orphans who arrived...
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Michael Kabongo is a British-Congolese teacher living in London when one day he suffers a devastating loss, and his life is thrown into a tailspin. As he struggles to find a way forward, Michael spontaneously decides to go to America and become someone new, living the life of his dreams--until his money runs out.
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S. Gagliano & Son has been a barber shop fixture in South Philly for decades. Frankie and Michael Gagliano's Italian immigrant father-Luigi to his customers, Papa to his sons-presides over the store, enlisting his children as soon as they're big enough to wield a broom. On their mother's deathbed, eight-year-old Frankie swears that he and his little brother will always take care of each other, a vow he endeavors to keep through their father's violent...
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It is 1953 in the tight-knit Italian neighborhood in Wilmington, Delaware. Maddalena Grasso has lost her country, her family, and the man she loved by coming to America; her mercurial husband, Antonio, has lost his opportunity to realize the American Dream; their new friend, Guilio Fabbri, a shy accordion player, has lost his beloved parents.
In the shadow of St. Anthony's Church, named for the patron saint of lost things, the prayers of these troubled...
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"A stunning debut novel, from Rhodes Scholar and winner of the Caine Prize for African Writing, Tope Folarin about a Nigerian family living in Utah and their uncomfortable assimilation to American life. Living in small-town Utah has always been an uneasyfit for Tunde Akinola's family, especially for his Nigeria-born parents. Though Tunde speaks English with a Midwestern accent, he can't escape the children who rub his skin and ask why the black won't...
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"Palestine, 1990. Seventeen-year-old Isra prefers reading books to entertaining the suitors her father has chosen for her. Over the course of a week, the naïve and dreamy girl finds herself quickly betrothed and married, and is soon living in Brooklyn. There Isra struggles to adapt to the expectations of her oppressive mother-in-law Fareeda and strange new husband Adam, a pressure that intensifies as she begins to have children -- four daughters...
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"Set in New York and China over three decades, Paper Names explores what it means to be American from three different perspectives. There's Tony, a Chinese-born engineer turned Manhattan doorman, who immigrated to the United States to give his family a better life. His daughter, Tammy, who we meet at age nine and follow through adulthood, and who grapples with the expectations of a first generation American and her own personal desires. Finally, there's...
12) Leslie
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To some she's intelligent and beautiful. To others she's proud and dangerous. At the historically black college of Dillard University in the lush mystical city of New Orleans, the beautiful and serious Leslie Beaudet is struggling with a dark secret of power in a world that is pulling her in many different directions. In the eyes of her Haitian immigrant father, Leslie is a queen who deserves more than the broken dreams and carnage of poverty. To...
13) Native believer
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"As M.'s life gradually fragments around him, he spins out into the pulsating underbelly of Philadelphia, where he encounters others grappling with fallout from the War on Terror."--
14) Housegirl
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Belinda knows how to follow the rules; as a housegirl, she has learned the right way to polish water glasses, to wash and fold a hundred handkerchiefs, and to keep a tight lid on memories of the village she left behind when she came to Kumasi. Mary is still learning the rules; the young housegirl-in-training is the little sister Belinda never had. Amma has had enough of the rules; a straight-A student at her exclusive London school, she has always...
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Set against the backdrop of the ancient walled city of Hyderabad and mounting Hindu-Muslim tensions, Madras on Rainy Days lyrically evokes the complexities of life behind the chador. A gorgeously written novel by an original new voice in international fiction.
Layla is torn among clashing identities--dutiful Muslim daughter and free, independent American woman. When she is nineteen, her parents inform Layla that a marriage has been arranged for...
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"Nima doesn't feel understood. By her mother, who grew up far away in a different land. By her suburban town, which makes her feel too much like an outsider to fit in and not enough like an outsider to feel like that she belongs somewhere else. At least she has her childhood friend Haitham, with whom she can let her guard down and be herself. Until she doesn't. As the ground is pulled out from under her, Nima must grapple with the phantom of a life...
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In the wake of 9/11, Shadi, a child of Muslim immigrants, tries to navigate her crumbling world of death, heartbreak, and bigotry in silence, until finally everything changes.
2003: the US has officially declared war on Iraq, and the American political world has evolved. Hate crimes are on the rise, FBI agents are infiltrating local mosques, and the Muslim community is harassed and targeted more than ever. Shadi, who wears hijab, keeps her head down....
19) Homeland elegies
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"A deeply personal work about identity and belonging in a nation coming apart at the seams, Homeland Elegies blends fact and fiction to tell an epic story of longing and dispossession in the world that 9/11 made. Part family drama, part social essay, part picaresque novel, at its heart it is the story of a father, a son, and the country they both call home. Ayad Akhtar forges a new narrative voice to capture a country in which debt has ruined countless...
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