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Ellis Island

Kate Kerrigan · back to the book

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24 books with the same feel

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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

ImmigrationIrelandImmigrant ProtagonistLeaving Home
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'Tis A Memoir

Frank McCourt · 512 pages

Immigrant ProtagonistImmigrationIrelandBelonging
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Leaving Ireland

Ann Moore · 515 pages

"Hoping for a better future, Gracelin O'Malley sets sail from her beloved Ireland, a journey that takes her to a world far different from anything she's ever known. After surviving the difficult voyage, she joins her brother Sean, already much changed by his exciting life in Manhattan. She takes a job in a saloon, learning firsthand the harsh reality of immigrant life and the horrors of the Irish

ImmigrationImmigrant ProtagonistIrelandNew York City
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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.

Immigrant ProtagonistImmigrationNew York CityIreland
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The Golem and the Jinni

Helene Wecker · 512 pages

In The Golem and the Jinni, a chance meeting between mythical beings takes readers on a dazzling journey through cultures in turn-of-the-century New York. Chava is a golem, a creature made of clay, brought to life to by a disgraced rabbi who dabbles in dark Kabbalistic magic and dies at sea on the voyage from Poland. Chava is unmoored and adrift as the ship arrives in New York harbor in 1899.

Immigrant ProtagonistImmigrationBelongingNew York City
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Maggie's Door

Patricia Reilly Giff · 167 pages

We will dance on the cliffs of Brooklyn.Maggie's Door is the story of the journey from Ireland to America told by both Nory and her neighbor and friend Sean Red Mallon, two different stories with the same destination--the home of Nory's sister Maggie, at 416 Smith Street, Brooklyn, America. Patricia Reilly Giff calls upon her long research into Irish history and her great powers as a storyteller i

ImmigrationImmigrant ProtagonistIrelandNew York City
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Scarlett

Alexandra Ripley · 832 pages

IrelandImmigrant ProtagonistMarriage in TroubleBelonging
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The Walking People

Mary Beth Keane · 404 pages

Greta Cahill never believed she would leave her village in the west of Ireland until she found herself on a ship bound for New York. Labeled a "softheaded goose" by her family, Greta discovers that in America she can fall in love, raise her own family, and earn a living. Though she longs to return and show her family what she has made of herself, her decision to spare her children knowledge of a s

ImmigrationImmigrant ProtagonistIrelandNew York City
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The Other Side of the World

Stephanie Bishop · 269 pages

In the tradition of Rachel Cusk's A Life's Work or Maggie O'Farrell's The Hand That First Held Mine comes a complex, tender and gorgeously written novel of parenthood, love and marriage that is impossible to put down. Cambridge 1963. Charlotte struggles to reconnect with the woman she was before children, and to find the time and energy to paint. Her husband, Henry, cannot face the thought of anot

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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.

Immigrant ProtagonistImmigrationNew York CityHistorical Fiction
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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

ImmigrationImmigrant ProtagonistBelongingHistorical Fiction
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Amerika

Franz Kafka · 299 pages

"Franz Kafka's diaries and letters suggest that his fascination with America grew out of a desire to break away from his native Prague, even if only in his imagination. Kafka died before he could finish what he liked to call his ''American novel," but he clearly entitled it Der Verschollene ("The Missing Person") in a letter to his fiancee, Felice Bauer, in 1912. Kafka began writing the novel that

Leaving HomeImmigrant ProtagonistImmigrationNew York City
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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,

ImmigrationImmigrant ProtagonistBelongingMarriage in Trouble
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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

Leaving HomeImmigrant ProtagonistImmigrationHistorical Fiction
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Girl in Translation

Jean Kwok · 293 pages

Immigrant ProtagonistImmigrationBelongingNew York City
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House of Sand and Fog

Andre Dubus III · 365 pages

ImmigrationImmigrant ProtagonistBelongingMarriage in Trouble
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Wildflower Girl

Marita Conlon-McKenna · 176 pages

ImmigrationImmigrant ProtagonistIrelandHistorical Fiction
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The Bean Trees

Barbara Kingsolver · 240 pages

Taylor, a poor Kentuckian making her way west with an abandoned baby girl, stops in Tucson where she finds friends and discovers resources in apparently empty places.

Leaving HomeBelongingImmigrationImmigrant Protagonist
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Murphy's Law

Rhys Bowen · 242 pages

Molly Murphy, on the run from the police in Ireland, becomes the prime suspect in the murder of a man at Ellis Island.

ImmigrationIrelandNew York CityHistorical Fiction
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Academy Street

Mary Costello · 192 pages

"A vibrant, intimate, hypnotic portrait of one woman's life, from an important new writer. Tess Lohan is the kind of woman that we meet and fail to notice every day. A single mother. A nurse. A quiet woman, who nonetheless feels things acutely--a woman with tumultuous emotions and few people to share them with. Academy Street is Mary Costello's luminous portrait of a whole life. It follows Tess fr

IrelandImmigrant ProtagonistImmigrationNew York City
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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.

ImmigrationImmigrant ProtagonistNew York CityHistorical Fiction
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Daughter of Fortune

Isabel Allende · 416 pages

"Orphaned at birth, Eliza Sommers is raised in the British colony of Valparaiso, Chile, by the well-intentioned Victorian spinster Miss Rose and her more rigid brother Jeremy. Just as she meets and falls in love with the wildly inappropriate Joaquin Andiera, a lowly clerk who works for Jeremy, gold is discovered in the hills of northern California. By 1849, Chileans of every stripe have fallen pre

ImmigrationImmigrant ProtagonistLeaving HomeHistorical Fiction
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The Leavers

Lisa Ko · 392 pages

"One morning, Deming Guo's mother, an undocumented Chinese immigrant named Polly, goes to her job at the nail salon and never comes home. With his mother gone, eleven-year-old Deming is left with no one to care for him. He is eventually adopted by two white college professors who move him from the Bronx to a small town upstate. Set in New York and China, the Leavers is the story of how one boy com

ImmigrationImmigrant ProtagonistBelongingNew York City
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The American Lady

Petra Durst-Benning · 455 pages

ImmigrationImmigrant ProtagonistNew York CityHistorical Fiction

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