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The Saint of Incipient Insanities

Elif Shafak · back to the book

What’s in it

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24 books with the same feel

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❤️

Chicago

Alaa Al Aswany · 342 pages

Post-September 11 Chicago becomes the site of a cultural collision of Egyptian and American lives, including a Ph. D. candidate whose traditional upbringing is challenged by her American experiences, and an émigré whose western values are countered by questions about his daughter's honor.

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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.

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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

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The Year of the Runaways

Sunjeev Sahota · 496 pages

The Year of the Runaways tells of the bold dreams and daily struggles of an unlikely family thrown together by circumstance. Thirteen young men live in a house in Sheffield, each in flight from India and in desperate search of a new life. Tarlochan, a former rickshaw driver, will say nothing about his past in Bihar; and Avtar has a secret that binds him to protect the choatic Randeep. Randeep, in

Immigrant ProtagonistImmigrationCultural IdentityEnsemble Cast
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How the García Girls Lost Their Accents

Julia Alvarez · 304 pages

It\'s a long way from Santo Domingo to the Bronx, but if anyone can go the distance, it\'s the Garcia girls. Four lively latinas plunged from a pampered life of privilege on an island compound into the big-city chaos of New York, they rebel against Mami and Papi\'s old-world discipline and embrace all that America has to offer.

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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

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The Book of Unknown Americans

Cristina Henriquez · 294 pages

After their daughter Maribel suffers a near-fatal accident, the Riveras leave Mexico and come to America. But upon settling at Redwood Apartments, a two-story cinderblock complex just off a highway in Delaware, they discover that Maribel's recovery-the piece of the American Dream on which they've pinned all their hopes-will not be easy. Every task seems to confront them with language, racial, and

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Kinfolk

Pearl S. Buck · 406 pages

Kinfolk follows the lives of the four children of Dr. Liang who migrated to the United States from China. The children return to China as adults. Each responds to their new life in China differently, providing rich insight into the struggles between Eastern and Western culture, and the differences between generations.

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Behold the Dreamers

Imbolo Mbue · 408 pages

When Jende Jonga journeys to New York City from Cameroon in 2004 on a visitors' visa in hopes of obtaining a green card, he's sure his life will only improve. After saving up enough money to bring over Jende's wife, Neni, and six-year-old son, the family moves into an apartment in Harlem. Then Jende hits the jackpot in 2007 when he lands a job as a chauffeur for Clark Edwards, a wealthy Lehman Bro

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Harvard Square

Andre Aciman · 292 pages

An Egyptian-Jewish Harvard graduate student trying to assimilate into American culture in 1977 befriends an impetuous, loud Arab cab driver and must choose between his dream or his friend. This is a tale of the wages of assimilation, a moving story of an immigrant's remembered youth and the nearly forgotten costs and sacrifices of becoming an American. It is the fall of 1977, and amid the lovely

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White Teeth

Zadie Smith · 480 pages

One of the most talked about fictional debuts of recent years, WHITE TEETH is a funny, generous, big-hearted novel, adored by critics and readers alike. Dealing - among many other things - with friendship, love, war, three cultures and three families over three generations, one brown mouse, and the tricky way the past has of coming back and biting you on the ankle, it is a life-affirming, riotous

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The Wangs vs. the World

Jade Chang · 368 pages

"A hilarious debut novel about a wealthy but fractured Chinese immigrant family that had it all, only to lose every last cent--and about the road trip they take across America that binds them back together. Charles Wang is mad at America. A brash, lovable immigrant businessman who built a cosmetics empire and made a fortune, he's just been ruined by the financial crisis. Now all Charles wants is t

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Lucy

Jamaica Kincaid · 163 pages

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Sour Sweet

Timothy Mo · 278 pages

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The Immigrant

Manju Kapur · 334 pages

"Nina and Ananda, both frustrated with their separate lives, search for something that will complete them. When a marriage between them is proposed, Nina is uncertain: can she really give up her home in Delhi to build a new life in Canada with a husband she barely knows?" "The consequences of change are far greater than she could have imagined. From what she eats to what she wears, Nina's whole wo

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The Mortifications

Derek Palacio · 310 pages

In 1980, a rural Cuban family is torn apart during the Mariel Boat-lift. Uxbal Encarnación--father, husband, political insurgent--refuses to leave behind the revolutionary ideals and lush tomato farms of his sun-soaked homeland. His wife Soledad takes young Isabel and Ulises hostage and flees with them to America, leaving behind Uxbal for the promise of a better life. But instead of settling with

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We Need New Names

NoViolet Bulawayo · 304 pages

Whenever foreigners visit Paradise they always ask Darling and her friends to smile for the camera. Here are some of the things Darling and her friends have to smile about: stealing guavas, gifts from NGOs, singing Lady Gaga at the tops of their voices. But they all want to go to the real paradise in America or Britain.

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Arranged Marriage: Stories

Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni · 320 pages

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Typical American

Gish Jen · 296 pages

The Changs immigrated to the United States from China for education and safety but are distracted by other goals.

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Natasha and Other Stories

David Bezmozgis · 160 pages

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The Thing Around Your Neck

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie · 240 pages

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie burst onto the literary scene with her remarkable debut novel, Purple Hibiscus, which critics hailed as "one of the best novels to come out of Africa in years" (Baltimore Sun), with "prose as lush as the Nigerian landscape that it powerfully evokes" (The Boston Globe); The Washington Post called her "the twenty-first-century daughter of Chinua Achebe." Her award-winning Ha

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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

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The Refugees

Viet Thanh Nguyen · 224 pages

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The Silence of Trees

Valya Dudycz Lupescu · 302 pages

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