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In the Skin of a Lion

Michael Ondaatje · back to the book

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24 books with the same feel

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The Lowland

Jhumpa Lahiri · 406 pages

Brothers Subhash and Udayan Mitra pursue vastly different lives--Udayan in rebellion-torn Calcutta, Subhash in a quiet corner of America--until a shattering tragedy compels Subhash to return to India, where he endeavors to heal family wounds.

ImmigrationImmigrant ProtagonistLyrical ProseLiterary Fiction
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My Ántonia

Willa Cather · 246 pages

My Antonia, first published 1918, is one of Willa Cather's greatest works. It is the last novel in the Prairie trilogy, preceded by O Pioneers! and The Song of the Lark.My Antonia tells the stories of several immigrant families who move out to rural Nebraska to start new lives in America, with a particular focus on a Bohemian family, the Shimerdas, whose eldest daughter is named Antonia. The book'

Immigrant ProtagonistImmigrationLyrical ProseLiterary Fiction
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On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

Ocean Vuong · 256 pages

On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous is a letter from a son to a mother who cannot read. Written when the speaker, Little Dog, is in his late twenties, the letter unearths a family’s history that began before he was born — a history whose epicenter is rooted in Vietnam — and serves as a doorway into parts of his life his mother has never known, all of it leading to an unforgettable revelation. At once

ImmigrationWorking-Class ProtagonistImmigrant ProtagonistLyrical Prose
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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

Immigrant ProtagonistImmigrationLyrical ProseLiterary Fiction
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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

Working-Class ProtagonistImmigrationImmigrant ProtagonistCharacter-Driven
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All Our Names

Dinaw Mengestu · 268 pages

Immigrant ProtagonistImmigrationLyrical ProseLiterary Fiction
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Christ in Concrete

Pietro Di Donato · 240 pages

Working-Class ProtagonistImmigrationImmigrant ProtagonistLiterary Fiction
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The Contract With God Trilogy: Life on Dropsie Avenue

Will Eisner · 498 pages

This book joins three works by Will Eisner, all set around Dropsie Avenue in the Bronx (New York). (1) Contract with God (1978), comprising four independent brief stories. (2) A Life Force (1988), which follows events in Dropsie Avenue during the Great Depression years, and (3) Dropsie Avenue (1995), where the story follows the neighborhood from the 1800s (farming community) to high-end suburb,

ImmigrationWorking-Class ProtagonistImmigrant ProtagonistCharacter-Driven
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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

Working-Class ProtagonistImmigrationImmigrant ProtagonistLiterary Fiction
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Continental Drift

Russell Banks · 384 pages

After his ill-fated pursuit of the American dream, Bob Dubois finds employment on a fishing boat off the Florida Keys where he becomes involved in a plot to smuggle two Haitians into Florida.

Working-Class ProtagonistImmigrant ProtagonistImmigrationLiterary Fiction
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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

Immigrant ProtagonistImmigrationLiterary FictionLyrical Prose
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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.

ImmigrationImmigrant ProtagonistLyrical ProseCharacter-Driven
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A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

Betty Smith · 443 pages

The beloved American classic about a young girl's coming-of-age at the turn of the century, Betty Smith's A Tree Grows in Brooklyn is a poignant and moving tale filled with compassion and cruelty, laughter and heartache, crowded with life and people and incident. The story of young, sensitive, and idealistic Francie Nolan and her bittersweet formative years in the slums of Williamsburg has enchant

Working-Class ProtagonistImmigrant ProtagonistImmigrationCharacter-Driven
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The Inheritance of Loss

Kiran Desai · 336 pages

In a crumbling, isolated house at the foot of Mount Kanchenjunga in the Himalayas lives an embittered judge who wants only to retire in peace, when his orphaned granddaughter, Sai, arrives on his doorstep. The judgeʼs cook watches over her distractedly, for his thoughts are often on his son, Biju, who is hopscotching from one gritty New York restaurant to another. Kiran Desaiʼs brilliant novel, pu

ImmigrationImmigrant ProtagonistLyrical ProseLiterary Fiction
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Afterimage

Helen Humphreys · 243 pages

"When Annie Phelan arrives at the Dashell farm to begin work as a maid, she finds her new mistress strapping turkey wings on a naked boy who is to play the Angel of Death. Annie knows one thing for sure - she's not at the prim Mrs. Gilbey's anymore.". "England in 1865 is aswirl with change. This is the age of invention, the Crystal Palace, progress, and the colonies. At the farm, the master, Eldo

Working-Class ProtagonistImmigrant ProtagonistLyrical ProseCharacter-Driven
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Red Sky in Morning

Paul Lynch · 277 pages

"A tense, thrilling debut novel that spans two continents, from "a writer to watch out for" (Colum McCann). It's 1832 and Coll Coyle has killed the wrong man. The dead man's father is an expert tracker and ruthless killer with a single-minded focus on vengeance. The hunt leads from the windswept bogs of County Donegal, across the Atlantic to the choleric work camps of the Pennsylvania Railroad, wh

ImmigrationImmigrant ProtagonistLyrical ProseLiterary Fiction
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Paradise Reclaimed

Halldor Laxness · 254 pages

ImmigrationImmigrant ProtagonistLiterary FictionLyrical Prose
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The Emigrants

Vilhelm Moberg · 375 pages

Working-Class ProtagonistImmigrant ProtagonistImmigrationCharacter-Driven
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Out of This Furnace

Thomas Bell

Working-Class ProtagonistImmigrationImmigrant ProtagonistLiterary Fiction
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Everything I Never Told You

Celeste Ng · 300 pages

"Lydia is dead. But they don't know this yet. So begins the story of this exquisite debut novel, about a Chinese American family living in 1970s small-town Ohio. Lydia is the favorite child of Marilyn and James Lee; their middle daughter, a girl who inherited her mother's bright blue eyes and her father's jet-black hair. Her parents are determined that Lydia will fulfill the dreams they were unabl

ImmigrationImmigrant ProtagonistLyrical ProseLiterary Fiction
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Native Speaker

Chang-rae Lee · 349 pages

Korean-American Henry Park is a "surreptitious, B+ student of life, illegal alien, emotional alien, yellow peril: neo-American, stranger, follower, traitor, spy ..." or so says his wife, in the list she writes upon leaving him. Henry is forever uncertain of his place, a perpetual outsider looking at American culture from a distance. As a man of two worlds, he is beginning to fear that he has betra

ImmigrationLyrical ProseImmigrant ProtagonistLiterary Fiction
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'Tis A Memoir

Frank McCourt · 512 pages

Working-Class ProtagonistImmigrationImmigrant ProtagonistCharacter-Driven
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Cutting for Stone

Abraham Verghese · 670 pages

Cutting for Stone (2009) is a novel written by Ethiopian-born Indian-American medical doctor and author Abraham Verghese. It is a saga of twin brothers, orphaned by their mother's death at their births and forsaken by their father. The book includes both a deep description of medical procedures and an exploration of the human side of medical practices. When first published, the novel was on The

Immigrant ProtagonistImmigrationLiterary FictionCharacter-Driven
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A Free Life

Ha Jin · 666 pages

From Ha Jin, the widely-acclaimed, award-winning author of Waiting and War Trash, comes a novel that takes his fiction to a new setting: 1990s America. We follow the Wu family--father Nan, mother Pingping, and son Taotao--as they fully sever their ties with China in the aftermath of the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre and begin a new, free life in the United States.At first, their future seems well

Working-Class ProtagonistImmigrationImmigrant ProtagonistLiterary Fiction

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