A Coal Miner's Bride: The Diary of Anetka Kaminska

So Far From Home: the Diary of Mary Driscoll, an Irish Mill Girl, Lowell, Massachusetts, 1847

Barry Denenberg · 170 pages

In the diary account of her journey from Ireland in 1847 and of her work in a mill in Lowell, Massachusetts, fourteen-year-old Mary reveals a great longing for her family.

Hear My Sorrow: The Diary of Angela Denoto, a Shirtwaist Worker, New York City 1909 (Dear America Series)

Deborah Hopkinson · 188 pages

ngela and her family have arrived in New York City from their village in Italy to find themselves settled in a small tenement apartment on the Lower East Side. When her father is no longer able to work, Angela must leave school and work in a shirtwaist factory. Against the backdrop of the birth of the labor union movement in the early 1900s, Angela plays a part in the drama and turmoil that erupt

Ashes of Roses

Mary Jane Auch · 250 pages

in 1914, Rose Nolan and her family come to America from Ireland. After some of the family has to be sent back, the rest of her family moves in with her uncle and live there. The book is focused through her point of view. It centers her life as a worker at the Triangle Shirtwaist factory.

Dreams in the Golden Country: The Diary of Zipporah Feldman, a Jewish Immigrant Girl, New York City, 1903

Kathryn Lasky · 190 pages

New dreams and old traditions flourish and clash when a Jewish girl and her family emigrate from Russia to America.

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

Honolulu

Alan Brennert · 439 pages

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

Brooklyn

Colm Toibin · 262 pages

In Ireland in the early 1950s, Eilis Lacey is one of many who cannot find work at home. Thus when a job is offered in America, it is clear to everyone that she must go. Leaving behind her family and country, Eilis heads for unfamiliar Brooklyn, and to a crowded boarding house where the landlady's intense scrutiny and the small jealousies of her fellow residents only deepen her isolation. Slowly, t

The Buddha in the Attic

Julie Otsuka · 129 pages

Presents the stories of six Japanese mail-order brides whose new lives in early twentieth-century San Francisco are marked by backbreaking migrant work, cultural struggles, children who reject their heritage, and the prospect of wartime internment.

The King of Mulberry Street

Donna Jo Napoli · 245 pages

In 1892, Dom, a nine-year old stowaway from Naples, Italy, arrives in New York and must learn to survive the perils of street life in the big city.

A Prairie as Wide as the Sea: The Immigrant Diary of Ivy Weatherall

Sarah Ellis · 206 pages

Mai 1926. Originaires d'Angleterre, Evelyn Weatherall, 11 ans, et sa famille émigrent en Saskatchewan après avoir été influencées par la publicité idyllique de l'immigration au Canada. Dans son journal, la fillette relate le quotidien de sa famille (les difficultés de ses parents à trouver un travail stable, l'obligation de son frère aîné à travailler pour payer les dettes de son oncle, les différ

The Red Umbrella

Christina Diaz Gonzalez · 284 pages

The Red Umbrella is the moving tale of a 14-year-old girl's journey from Cuba to America as part of Operation Pedro Pan--an organized exodus of more than 14,000 unaccompanied children, whose parents sent them away to escape Fidel Castro's revolution.In 1961, two years after the Communist revolution, Lucia Alvarez still leads a carefree life, dreaming of parties and her first crush. But when the so

Brick Lane

Monica Ali · 422 pages

Monica Ali's debut novel, Brick Lane, was published in 2003 and was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. It was adapted as a 2007 film of the same name. Carrying into her adult years a sense of fatalism instilled during her hardscrabble birth, Nazneen finds herself married off to a man twice her age and moved to London, where she begins to wonder if she has a say in her own destiny.

The Circuit: Stories from the Life of a Migrant Child

Francisco Jimenez · 134 pages

The Bride Test

Helen Hoang

Pachinko

Min Jin Lee · 560 pages

In the early 1900s, teenaged Sunja, the adored daughter of a crippled fisherman, falls for a wealthy stranger at the seashore near her home in Korea. He promises her the world, but when she discovers she is pregnant--and that her lover is married--she refuses to be bought. Instead, she accepts an offer of marriage from a gentle, sickly minister passing through on his way to Japan. But her decision

Picture Bride

Yoshiko Uchida · 216 pages

Carrying a photograph of the man she is to marry but has yet to meet, young Hana Omiya arrives in San Francisco, California, in 1917, one of several hundred Japanese "picture brides" whose arranged marriages brought them to America in the early 1900s. Her story is intertwined with others: her husband, Taro Takeda, an Oakland shopkeeper; Kiku and her husband Henry, who reject demeaning city work t

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

Bread Givers: A Novel

Anzia Yezierska · 297 pages

A young Jewish girl from New York's Lower East Side rebels against the tyranny and chauvinism of her immigrant father, determined to assert her freedom and independence.

The Jungle

Upton Sinclair · 342 pages

Upton Sinclair's dramatic and deeply moving story exposed the brutal conditions in the Chicago stockyards at the turn of the nineteenth century and brought into sharp moral focus the appalling odds against which immigrants and other working people struggled for their share of the American dream. Denounced by the conservative press as an un-American libel on the meatpacking industry, the book was c

The Fortunate Pilgrim

Mario Puzo · 301 pages

Lucia Santa has traveled three thousand miles of dark ocean, from the mountain farms of Italy to the streets of New York, hoping for a better life. Instead, she finds herself in Hell's Kitchen, in a bad marriage, raising six children on her own. As Lucia struggles to hold her family together, her daughter confronts the adult world of work and romance while her eldest son is drawn into the mafia. M

Don't You Dare Read This, Mrs. Dunphrey

Margaret Peterson Haddix · 125 pages

Mrs. Dunphrey agrees not to read the private entries written in her students' English journals, thus Tish Bonner finds herself pouring her emotions into her book in an effort to relieve the pressures in her life that she feels she cannot discuss with anyone.

The Distance Between Us

Reyna Grande · 352 pages

Esperanza Rising

Pam Munoz Ryan · 262 pages

Esperanza and her mother are forced to leave their life of wealth and privilege in Mexico to go work in the labor camps of Southern California, where they must adapt to the harsh circumstances facing Mexican farm workers on the eve of the Great Depression.