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The Return

Dany Laferriere, David Homel · back to the book

What’s in it

Tap a tag: ❤ = this matters to me · tap again ✕ = don’t care · again to reset. The list below updates each time.

24 books with the same feel

Include books by the same author
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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

Grief Over a ParentImmigrant ProtagonistDeath of a ParentCultural Identity
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The Namesake

Jhumpa Lahiri · 304 pages

"With a new afterword from Jhumpa Lahiri, a new edition of the contemporary classic. Meet the Ganguli family, new arrivals from Calcutta, trying their best to become Americans even as they pine for home. The name they bestow on their firstborn, Gogol, betrays all the conflicts of honoring tradition in a new world--conflicts that will haunt Gogol on his own winding path through divided loyalties, c

Grief Over a ParentDeath of a ParentImmigrant ProtagonistCultural Identity
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Black Cake

Charmaine Wilkerson · 385 pages

Grief Over a ParentDeath of a ParentImmigrant ProtagonistCultural Identity
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Soucouyant

David Chariandy · 210 pages

"A soucouyant is an evil spirit in Caribbean folklore, and a symbol here of the distant and dimly remembered legacies that continue to haunt the Americas. This first novel set in Ontario, in a house near the Scarborough Bluffs, focuses on a Canadian-born son who despairingly abandons his Caribbean-born mother suffering from dementia." "The son returns after two years to confront his mother but als

CaribbeanImmigrant ProtagonistCultural IdentityLyrical Prose
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The Agüero Sisters

Cristina Garcia · 336 pages

CaribbeanCultural IdentityImmigrant ProtagonistLyrical Prose
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The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

Junot Diaz · 352 pages

Things have never been easy for Oscar. A ghetto nerd living with his Dominican family in New Jersey, he's sweet but disastrously overweight. He dreams of becoming the next J. R. R. Tolkien and he keeps falling hopelessly in love. Poor Oscar may never get what he wants, thanks to the Fuku - the curse that has haunted his family for generations. With dazzling energy and insight Díaz immerses us

CaribbeanImmigrant ProtagonistCultural IdentityLiterary Fiction
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The Tiger's Wife

Tea Obreht · 360 pages

Remembering childhood stories her grandfather once told her, young physician Natalia becomes convinced that he spent his last days searching for "the deathless man," a vagabond who claimed to be immortal. As Natalia struggles to understand why her grandfather, a deeply rational man would go on such a farfetched journey, she stumbles across a clue that leads her to the extraordinary story of the ti

Grief Over a ParentDeath of a ParentCultural IdentityLyrical Prose
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A Life Apart

Neel Mukherjee · 352 pages

Ritwik Ghosh, twenty-two and recently orphaned, finds the chance to start a new life when he arrives in England from Calcutta. But Oxford holds little of the salvation Ritwik is looking for. Instead, he moves to London, where he drops out of official existence into a shadowy hinterland of illegal immigrants. The story that Ritwik writes to stave off his loneliness begins to find ghostly echoes in

Immigrant ProtagonistDeath of a ParentCultural IdentityLiterary Fiction
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Breath, Eyes, Memory

Edwidge Danticat · 234 pages

At the age of twelve, Sophie Caco is sent from the impoverished village of Croix-des-Rosets to New York to be reunited with her mother she barely remembers. There she discovers secrets that no child should ever know and where she gains a legacy of shame that can only be healed when she returns to Haiti, to the woman who first reared her. What ensues is a passionate journey through a landscape cha

CaribbeanImmigrant ProtagonistCultural IdentityLiterary Fiction
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The Friends

Rosa Guy · 196 pages

Phyllisia eventually recognizes that her own selfish pride rather than her mother's death and her father's tyrannical behavior created the gulf between her and her best friend.

Immigrant ProtagonistCaribbeanDeath of a ParentCultural Identity
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Pao

Kerry Young

As a boy, Pao came to Jamaica with his mother and brother in the wake of the Chinese Civil War. Pao becomes a powerful man, but he's not a typical crime boss. He is sensitive at heart and guided by the principles of Sun Tzu's Art of War, even though, as he discovers, the wisdom of the ancient Chinese sage can be tough to interpret when applied to the criminal annd predicament he faces. "Kingston,

Immigrant ProtagonistCaribbeanCultural IdentityLiterary Fiction
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The Way of the Warrior

Chris Bradford

Death of a ParentGrief Over a ParentImmigrant ProtagonistCultural Identity
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Foreign Soil

Maxine Beneba Clarke · 265 pages

Immigrant ProtagonistCaribbeanCultural IdentityLiterary Fiction
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Ayiti

Roxane Gay · 122 pages

CaribbeanImmigrant ProtagonistCultural IdentityLiterary Fiction
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How to Read the Air

Dinaw Mengestu · 312 pages

Leaving behind his marriage and job in New York, Jonas, the son of Ethiopian immigrants, sets out to retrace his mother and father's trip and weave together a family history that will take him from the war-torn Ethiopia of his parents' youth to his life in the America of today.

Immigrant ProtagonistCultural IdentityLyrical ProseLiterary Fiction
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The Mimic Men

V.S. Naipaul · 275 pages

"A profound novel of cultural displacement, The Mimic Men masterfully evokes a colonial man's experience in a postcolonial world. Born of Indian heritage and raised on a British-dependent Caribbean island, Ralph Singh has retired to suburban London, writing his memoirs as a means to impose order on a chaotic existence. His memories lead him to recognize the paradox of his childhood during which he

CaribbeanImmigrant ProtagonistCultural IdentityLiterary Fiction
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Lucy

Jamaica Kincaid · 163 pages

CaribbeanImmigrant ProtagonistCultural IdentityLiterary Fiction
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The Interpreter

Suki Kim · 294 pages

"Suzy Park is a twenty-nine-year-old Korean-American interpreter for the New York City courts. During one court case she inadvertently makes a startling and ominous discovery about her family's history that will send her on a chilling quest. Five years earlier, her parents - hardworking greengrocers who forfeited personal happiness for their children's gain - were brutally murdered in an apparent

Immigrant ProtagonistDeath of a ParentCultural 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 IdentityLyrical ProseLiterary Fiction
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Christ in Concrete

Pietro Di Donato · 240 pages

Immigrant ProtagonistDeath of a ParentCultural IdentityLiterary Fiction
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CaribbeanImmigrant ProtagonistLyrical ProseLiterary Fiction
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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

CaribbeanImmigrant ProtagonistCultural IdentityLiterary Fiction
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In Cuba I Was A German Shepherd

Ana Menendez · 229 pages

Immigrant ProtagonistCaribbeanCultural IdentityLiterary Fiction
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The Island of Eternal Love

Daina Chaviano · 336 pages

CaribbeanImmigrant ProtagonistLyrical ProseLiterary Fiction
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