Monsieur Linh and His Child

Little Bee

Chris Cleave · 288 pages

A haunting novel about the tenuous friendship that blooms between two disparate strangers--one an illegal Nigerian refugee, the other a recent widow from suburban London.

The Five People You Meet in Heaven

Mitch Albom · 196 pages

The Five People You Meet In Heaven is a 2003 novel by Mitch Albom. It follows the life and death of a ride mechanic named Eddie who is killed in an amusement park accident and sent to heaven, where he encounters five people who had a significant impact on him while he was alive. It was published by Hyperion and remained on the New York Times Best Seller list for 95 weeks.

The Best We Could Do

Thi Bui · 335 pages

The author describes her experiences as a young Vietnamese immigrant, highlighting her family's move from their war-torn home to the United States in graphic novel format.

Everything Sad Is Untrue

Daniel Nayeri · 356 pages

The Arrival

Shaun Tan · 128 pages

In this wordless graphic novel, a man leaves his homeland and sets off for a new country, where he must build a new life for himself and try to support his family back home. His new country is full of strange arquitectural wonders, fantastic animals and other immigrants with stories of why they left home.

The Sense of an Ending

Julian Barnes · 152 pages

By an acclaimed writer at the height of his powers, The Sense of an Ending extends a streak of extraordinary books that began with the best-selling Arthur & George and continued with Nothing to Be Frightened Of and, most recently, Pulse. This intense new novel follows a middle-aged man as he contends with a past he has never much thought about—until his closest childhood friends return with a

Go, Went, Gone

Jenny Erpenbeck · 295 pages

The novel tells the tale of Richard, a retired classics professor who lives in Berlin. His wife has died, and he lives a routine existence until one day he spies some African refugees staging a hunger strike in Alexanderplatz. Curiosity turns to compassion and an inner transformation, as he visits their shelter, interviews them, and becomes embroiled in their harrowing fates. Go, Went, Gone is a s

The Bone Sparrow

Zana Fraillon · 256 pages

Subhi is a refugee. Born in an Australian permanent detention center after his mother and sister fled the violence of a distant homeland, Subhi has only ever known life behind the fences. But his world is far bigger than that-every night, the magical Night Sea from his mother's stories brings him gifts, the faraway whales sing to him, and the birds tell their stories.

The Old Man and the Sea

Ernest Hemingway · 127 pages

Set in the Gulf Stream off the coast of Havana, Hemingway's magnificent fable is the tale of an old man, a young boy and a giant fish. This story of heroic endeavour won Hemingway the Nobel Prize for Literature. It stands as a unique and timeless vision of the beauty and grief of man's challenge to the elements.

A Long Petal of the Sea

Isabel Allende · 325 pages

Unaccustomed Earth

Jhumpa Lahiri · 352 pages

These eight stories by beloved and bestselling author Jhumpa Lahiri take us from Cambridge and Seattle to India and Thailand, as they explore the secrets at the heart of family life. Here they enter the worlds of sisters and brothers, fathers and mothers, daughters and sons, friends and lovers. Rich with the signature gifts that have established Jhumpa Lahiri as one of our most essential writers,

The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears

Dinaw Mengestu · 234 pages

Seventeen years ago, Sepha Stephanos fled the Ethiopian Revolution after witnessing soldiers beat his father to the point of certain death, selling off his parents' jewelry to pay for passage to the United States. Now he finds himself running a grocery store in a poor African-American neighborhood in Washington, D.C. His only companions are two fellow African immigrants who share his feelings of f

Snow Hunters

Paul Yoon · 196 pages

It is 1954 and the story traces the extraordinary journey of Yohan, who defects from his country at the end of the Korean War, leaving his friends and family behind to seek a new life on the coast of Brazil. Throughout his years there, four people slip in and out of his life: Kiyoshi, the Japanese tailor for whom he works; Peixe, the groundskeeper at the town church; and two vagrant children named

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

Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood

Marjane Satrapi · 160 pages

Wise, funny, and heartbreaking, Persepolis is Marjane Satrapi’s memoir of growing up in Iran during the Islamic Revolution. In powerful black-and-white comic strip images, Satrapi tells the story of her life in Tehran from ages six to fourteen, years that saw the overthrow of the Shah’s regime, the triumph of the Islamic Revolution, and the devastating effects of war with Iraq. The intelligent and

Ru

Kim Thuy · 141 pages

A runaway bestseller in Quebec, with foreign rights sold to 15 countries around the world, Kim Thuy's Governor General's Literary Award-winning RU is a lullaby for Vietnam and a love letter to a new homeland. In vignettes of exquisite clarity, sharp observation and sly wit, we are carried along on an unforgettable journey from a palatial residence in Saigon to a crowded and muddy Malaysian refugee

A Year of Marvellous Ways

Sarah Winman · 326 pages

Cornwall, 1947. Marvellous Ways is a ninety-year-old woman who's lived alone in a remote creek for nearly all her life. Recently she's taken to spending her days sitting on a mooring stone by the river with a telescope. She's waiting for something - she's not sure what, but she'll know it when she sees it. Drake is a young soldier left reeling by the war. He's agreed to fulfil a dying man's last w

Our Souls at Night

Kent Haruf · 192 pages

"A spare yet eloquent, bittersweet yet inspiring story of a man and a woman who, in advanced age, come together to wrestle with the events of their lives and their hopes for the imminent future"--

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

What Is the What

Dave Eggers · 475 pages

*What Is the What* is the epic novel based on the life of Valentino Achak Deng who, along with thousands of other children--the so-called Lost Boys--was forced to leave his village in Sudan at the age of seven and trek hundreds of miles by foot, pursued by militias, government bombers, and wild animals, crossing the deserts of three countries to find freedom. When he finally is resettled in the Un

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

Sweetland

Michael Crummey · 322 pages

For twelve generations, the inhabitants of a remote island in Newfoundland have lived and died together. Now, in the second decade of the 21st century, they are facing resettlement. They have each been offered a generous compensation package to leave the island for good. There's just one proviso: everyone must go. Gradually, all of the residents surrender to the inevitable. All of the residents, t

The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry

Rachel Joyce · 355 pages

Harold Fry has recently retired and now, he doesn't do very much. Even mowing the lawn, like his wife Maureen tells him to do, seems too much work for him. When, one day, he recieves a lettre in a pink envelope, this lazyness changes. In it, his collegue from long time ago, Queenie Hennessy, tells him she is going to die soon from a cancer in a hospice at the other end of England. Harold, at first

All the Lonely People

Mike Gayle · 430 pages