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Broken Paradise

Cecilia Samartin · back to the book

What’s in it

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24 books with the same feel

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❤️

Small Island

Andrea Levy · 448 pages

The story of Small Island revolves around four characters, Hortense, Gilbert, Queenie and Bernard. They are two couples, one white Queenie and Bernard and one Black, Hortense and Gilbert. The novel is narrated in the perspective of these four characters. Plot is set in England of 1948. Gilbert is a soldier in Royal force from Jamaica. He is living in a small room in the house owned by Queenie. Th

CaribbeanHistorical FictionEmotionalBittersweet
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The Mermaid of Black Conch: A novel

Monique Roffey · 240 pages

CaribbeanEmotionalBittersweetHistorical Fiction
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The Joy Luck Club

Amy Tan · 332 pages

Four mothers, four daughters, four families, whose histories shift with the four winds depending on who's telling the stories. In 1949, four Chinese women, recent immigrants to San Francisco, meet weekly to play mahjong and tell stories of what they left behind in China. United in loss and new hope for their daughters' futures, they call themselves the Joy Luck Club. Their daughters, who have neve

EmotionalHistorical FictionWar and Its AftermathImmigration
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Black Cake

Charmaine Wilkerson · 385 pages

EmotionalImmigrant ProtagonistImmigrationHistorical Fiction
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The German Girl

Armando Lucas Correa · 557 pages

Before everything changed, young Hannah Rosenthal lived a charmed life. But now, in 1939, the streets of Berlin are draped with red, white, and black flags; her family's fine possessions are hauled away; and they are no longer welcome in the places that once felt like home. Hannah and her best friend, Leo Martin, make a pact: whatever the future has in store for them, they'll meet it together. Hop

CaribbeanEmotionalHistorical FictionRefugee Experience
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Brother, I'm Dying

Edwidge Danticat · 288 pages

From the age of four, award-winning writer Edwidge Danticat came to think of her uncle Joseph as her "second father," when she was placed in his care after her parents left Haiti for America. And so she was both elated and saddened when, at twelve, she joined her parents and youngest brothers in New York City. As Edwidge made a life in a new country, adjusting to being far away from so many who sh

CaribbeanEmotionalImmigrationImmigrant Protagonist
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Shanghai Girls

Lisa See · 417 pages

In 1937, Shanghai is the Paris of Asia, a city of great wealth and glamour, the home of millionaires and beggars, gangsters and gamblers, patriots and revolutionaries, artists and warlords. Thanks to the financial security and material comforts provided by their father's prosperous rickshaw business, twenty-one-year-old Pearl Chin and her younger sister, May, are having the time of their lives. Th

EmotionalHistorical FictionWar and Its AftermathRefugee Experience
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The Golden Hour

Beatriz Williams · 480 pages

CaribbeanHistorical FictionIslandCharacter-Driven
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The Island of Eternal Love

Daina Chaviano · 336 pages

CaribbeanImmigrant ProtagonistImmigrationHistorical Fiction
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The German Wife

Kelly Rimmer · 464 pages

EmotionalHistorical FictionImmigrant ProtagonistImmigration
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The Shoemaker's Wife

Adriana Trigiani · 475 pages

Two star-crossed lovers--Enza and Ciro--meet and separate, until, finally, the power of their love changes both of their lives forever. Set during the years preceding and during World War I.

EmotionalHistorical FictionImmigrationImmigrant Protagonist
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'Til the Well Runs Dry

Lauren Francis-Sharma · 399 pages

"An epic saga about a Trinidadian family spanning WWII to the early Sixties. Told in alternating voices, the author recounts the story of Marcia, our fierce heroine, who leaves her island home in order to protect the man she's loved for years, and finds herself isolated in a strange land but with the determination to survive and rebuild" --

CaribbeanHistorical FictionEmotionalFemale Lead
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In the Time of the Butterflies

Julia Alvarez · 325 pages

It is November 25, 1960, and three beautiful sisters have been found near their wrecked Jeep at the bottom of a 150-foot cliff on the north coast of the Dominican Republic. The official state newspaper reports their deaths as accidental. It does not mention that a fourth sister lives. Nor does it explain that the sisters were among the leading opponents of Gen. Rafael Leonidas Trujillo’s dictators

CaribbeanHistorical FictionEmotionalSisters
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The Boston Girl

Anita Diamant · 322 pages

A story "about family ties and values, friendship and feminism told through the eyes of a young Jewish woman growing up in Boston in the early twentieth century. Addie Baum is The Boston Girl, born in 1900 to immigrant parents who were unprepared for and suspicious of America and its effect on their three daughters. Growing up in the North End, then a teeming multicultural neighborhood, Addie's in

Historical FictionEmotionalImmigrationImmigrant Protagonist
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Island Beneath the Sea

Isabel Allende · 457 pages

Though her childhood of slavery on Saint-Domingue is one of brutality and fear, Tt? finds solace in the traditional rhythms of African drums and in the voodoo loas she discovers through her fellow slaves. When twenty-year-old Toulouse Valmorain arrives on the island in 1770 to run his father's plantation, he purchases young Tt? as his bride and becomes dependent on the services of his teenaged sla

CaribbeanHistorical FictionEmotionalFemale Lead
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The Bookbinder

Pip Williams · 437 pages

EmotionalHistorical FictionWar and Its AftermathRefugee Experience
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Evergreen

Belva Plain · 595 pages

The towering modern classic of passion and ambition that forever changed the way we see the courageous immigrants who came to America's shores -- the story of Anna Friedman transfixes us with the turbulent emotions of a woman and her family touched by war, tragedy, and the devastating secrets of one forbidden love... bittersweet and evergreen.From the Paperback edition.

EmotionalHistorical FictionImmigrationImmigrant Protagonist
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An Italian Wife

Ann Hood · 375 pages

The extraordinary story of Josephine Rimaldi spans more than seven decades, beginning in turn-of-the-century Italy, when at fourteen she is forced into an arranged marriage to a man she doesn't know or love who is about to depart for America. Bound by tradition, Josephine gives birth to seven children. The last, Valentina, is conceived in passion, born in secret, and given up for adoption. Josephi

Historical FictionEmotionalImmigrationImmigrant Protagonist
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The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay

Michael Chabon · 639 pages

The novel begins in 1939 with the arrival of 19-year-old Josef "Joe" Kavalier as a refugee in New York City, where he comes to live with his 17-year-old cousin Sammy Klayman. Joe escaped from Prague with the help of his teacher Kornblum by hiding in a coffin along with the inanimate Golem of Prague, leaving the rest of his family, including his younger brother Thomas, behind. Besides having a shar

EmotionalHistorical FictionImmigrationImmigrant Protagonist
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The Island

Victoria Hislop · 474 pages

The Petrakis family lives in the small Greek seaside village of Plaka. Just off the coast is the tiny island of Spinalonga, where the nation's leper colony once was located—a place that has haunted four generations of Petrakis women. There's Eleni, ripped from her husband and two young daughters and sent to Spinalonga in 1939, and her daughters Maria, finding joy in the everyday as she dutifully c

EmotionalHistorical FictionWar and Its AftermathWomen's Fiction
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Salt Houses

Hala Alyan · 320 pages

"From a dazzling new literary voice, a debut novel about a Palestinian family caught between present and past, between displacement and home ... On the eve of her daughter Alia's wedding, Salma reads the girl's future in a cup of coffee dregs. She sees an unsettled life for Alia and her children; she also sees travel, and luck. While she chooses to keep her predictions to herself that day, they wi

EmotionalImmigrationHistorical FictionBittersweet
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Snow Falling on Cedars

David Guterson · 424 pages

On San Piedro, an island of rugged, spectacular beauty in Puget Sound, home to salmon fishermen and strawberry farmers, a Japanese-American fisherman stands trial, charged with murder. The year is 1954, and the shadow of World War II, with its brutality abroad and internment of Japanese Americans at home, hangs over the courtroom. Ishmael Cambers, who lost an arm in the Pacific war and now runs th

EmotionalHistorical FictionImmigrationBittersweet
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The Pirate's Daughter

Margaret Cezair-Thompson · 432 pages

Errol Flynn washes up on the island in the 'Zaca', his storm-wrecked yacht. Ida Joseph, teenaged daughter of Port Antonio's Justice of the Peace, is intrigued to learn that the 'World's Handsomest Man' is on the island, and makes it her business to meet him. For the jaded swashbuckler, Jamaica is a tropical paradise that offers adventure and the promise of personal salvation. Soon Flynn has made a

CaribbeanHistorical FictionIslandFemale Lead
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A Faraway Island

Annika Thor · 247 pages

In 1939 Sweden, two Jewish sisters wait for their parents to join them in fleeing the Nazis in Austria, but while eight-year-old Nellie settles in quickly, twelve-year-old Stephie feels stranded at the end of the world, with a foster mother who is as cold and unforgiving as the island on which they live.

EmotionalHistorical FictionImmigrant ProtagonistIsland

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