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The Enigma of Arrival: A Novel in Five Sections

V.S. Naipaul · back to the book

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24 books with the same feel

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❤️

The Lacuna

Barbara Kingsolver · 528 pages

In her most accomplished novel, Barbara Kingsolver takes us on an epic journey from the Mexico City of artists Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo to the America of Pearl Harbor, FDR, and J. Edgar Hoover. The Lacuna is a poignant story of a man pulled between two nations as they invent their modern identities.Born in the United States, reared in a series of provisional households in Mexico-from a coastal

Immigrant ProtagonistWriter ProtagonistSlow-PacedCultural Identity
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Netherland

Joseph O'Neill · 256 pages

In a New York City made phantasmagorical by the events of 9/11, Hans--a banker originally from the Netherlands--finds himself marooned among the strange occupants of the Chelsea Hotel after his English wife and son return to London. Alone and untethered, feeling lost in the country he had come to regard as home, Hans stumbles upon the vibrant New York subculture of cricket, where he revisits his l

Immigrant ProtagonistSlow-PacedCultural IdentityLiterary Fiction
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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

Immigrant ProtagonistCultural IdentityWriter ProtagonistSlow-Paced
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Ulysses

James Joyce · 736 pages

Written over a seven-year period, from 1914 to 1921, this book has survived bowdlerization, legal action and controversy. The novel deals with the events of one day in Dublin, 16th June 1904, now known as "Bloomsday". The principal characters are Stephen Dedalus, Leopold Bloom and his wife Molly. Ulysses has been labelled dirty, blasphemous and unreadable. In a famous 1933 court decision, Judge Jo

ColonialismCultural IdentitySlow-PacedLiterary Fiction
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This Is How You Lose Her

Junot Diaz · 240 pages

This is a collection of stories that explores the power of love in all its forms, obsessive love, illicit love, fading love, maternal love, as it is shaped by passion, betrayal, and the echoes of intimacy.

Immigrant ProtagonistCultural IdentityWriter ProtagonistLiterary Fiction
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Euphoria

Lily King · 272 pages

"English anthropologist Andrew Banson has been alone in the field for several years, studying the Kiona river tribe in the Territory of New Guinea. Haunted by the memory of his brothers' deaths and increasingly frustrated and isolated by his research, Bankson is on the verge of suicide when a chance encounter with colleagues, the controversial Nell Stone and her wry and mercurial Australian husban

ColonialismWriter ProtagonistSlow-PacedCultural Identity
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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 ProtagonistSlow-PacedCultural IdentityLyrical Prose
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The Gift

Vladimir Nabokov · 361 pages

De eerste fase van het schrijverschap van een jonge, voor de revolutie gevluchte Russische dichter in Berlijn.

Immigrant ProtagonistSlow-PacedWriter ProtagonistLiterary Fiction
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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.

Immigrant ProtagonistSlow-PacedCultural IdentityLiterary Fiction
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Forty Rooms

Olga Grushin · 342 pages

Follows the life of a woman born in Moscow who leaves for the United States, where she finds happiness and love but must also deal with the ghosts of her youth.

Immigrant ProtagonistWriter ProtagonistCultural IdentityLiterary Fiction
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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 ProtagonistCultural IdentitySlow-PacedLyrical Prose
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True At First Light: A Fictional Memoir

Ernest Hemingway, Patrick Hemingway · 319 pages

"Both revealing self-portrait and dramatic fictional chronicle of his final African safari, Ernest Hemingway's last unpublished work was written when he returned from Kenya in 1953." (From the 1999 hardback edition dustjacket.)

Writer ProtagonistColonialismSlow-PacedLiterary Fiction
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The In-Between World of Vikram Lall

M.G. Vassanji · 384 pages

ColonialismCultural IdentityImmigrant ProtagonistLiterary Fiction
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Season of Migration to the North

Tayeb Salih · 169 pages

"When a young man returns to his village in the Sudan after many years studying in Europe, he finds that among the familiar faces there is now a stranger -- the enigmatic Mustafa Sa'eed. As the two become friends, Mustafa tells the younger man the disturbing story of his own life in London after the First World War. Lionized by society and desired by women as an exotic novelty, Mustafa was driven

Immigrant ProtagonistCultural IdentityColonialismLiterary Fiction
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A Memory Called Empire

Arkady Martine · 448 pages

ColonialismImmigrant ProtagonistCultural IdentitySlow-Paced
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The Sympathizer

Viet Thanh Nguyen · 384 pages

Follows a Viet Cong agent as he spies on a South Vietnamese army general and his compatriots as they start a new life in 1975 Los Angeles.

Immigrant ProtagonistCultural IdentityColonialismLiterary Fiction
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The Mission Song

John le Carre · 352 pages

Wanneer een Afrikaanse tolk bij een geheim topoverleg ontdekt dat men een invasie van het noodlijdende Congo plant, probeert hij dat wereldkundig te maken.

Immigrant ProtagonistColonialismCultural IdentityCharacter-Driven
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Circling the Sun

Paula McLain · 366 pages

ColonialismWriter ProtagonistSlow-PacedLiterary 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

Immigrant ProtagonistSlow-PacedCultural IdentityLyrical Prose
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The Book of Salt

Monique Truong · 272 pages

In deciding if he should accompany his employers to America, stay in France, or go back to his native Vietnam, Binh recalls his life in Vietnam, the jobs he's held since leaving there, and the people it has helped him meet.

Immigrant ProtagonistCultural IdentityLiterary FictionCharacter-Driven
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Everything Is Illuminated

Jonathan Safran Foer · 288 pages

A young man arrives in the Ukraine, clutching in his hand a tattered photograph. He is searching for the woman who fifty years ago saved his grandfather from the Nazis. Unfortunately, however, he is aided in his quest by Alex, a translator with an uncanny ability to mangle English into new forms; a 'blind' old man haunted by memories of the war; and an undersexed guide dog named Sammy Davis, Jr, J

Immigrant ProtagonistWriter ProtagonistCultural IdentityLyrical Prose
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The Zahir

Paulo Coelho · 320 pages

Set in Paris and in the enchanting landscape of central Asia, this new novel by the author of the international bestsellers The Alchemist and Eleven Minutes follows the journey of a man obsessed with finding the wife who left him without an explanation.The narrator of The Zahir is a bestselling novelist who lives in Paris and enjoys all the privileges that money and celebrity bring. His wife of te

Slow-PacedWriter ProtagonistLiterary FictionCharacter-Driven
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Martyr!

Kaveh Akbar · 352 pages

Cyrus Shams is lost. Ever since his mother’s plane was senselessly shot down over the Persian Gulf when he was just a baby, Cyrus has been grappling with her death. Now, newly sober, he is set to learn the truth of her life. When an encounter with a dying artist leads Cyrus towards the mysteries of his past - an uncle who rode through Iranian battlefields dressed as an Angel of Death, a haun

Immigrant ProtagonistCultural IdentityWriter ProtagonistLiterary Fiction
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Child of All Nations

Pramoedya Ananta Toer · 318 pages

"Coming to grips with the oppression and injustice of the European regime in his country, Minke, [the Dutch-educated javaese writer] struggles to assert his voice and the voices of his people - but he is met at every turn by the corruption of those he trusted and by the tragedies that befall those he loves most."--Back cover.

Cultural IdentityWriter ProtagonistColonialismLiterary Fiction

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