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🧲 Books like this

Pao

Kerry Young · 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
❤️

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 ProtagonistImmigrationCultural Identity
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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 ProtagonistImmigrationCultural Identity
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The Dew Breaker

Edwidge Danticat · 244 pages

CaribbeanImmigrant ProtagonistImmigrationCultural Identity
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The Return

Dany Laferriere, David Homel · 227 pages

After his father dies, Haitian-born Dany leaves Montreal in order to return his father's body to Baraderes, the village in Haiti where he was born.

CaribbeanImmigrant ProtagonistImmigrationCultural Identity
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The Russian Debutante's Handbook

Gary Shteyngart · 464 pages

"Vladimir Girshkin - twenty-five-year-old Russian immigrant, "Little Failure" according to his high-achieving mother, unhappy lover to fat dungeon mistress Challah (his "little Challah bread"), and lowly clerk at the bureaucratic Emma Lazarus Immigrant Absorption Society - is about to have his first break. When the unlikely figure of a wealthy but psychotic old Russian war hero appears and introd

Immigrant ProtagonistOrganized CrimeImmigrationCultural 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 ProtagonistImmigrationCultural Identity
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Lucy

Jamaica Kincaid · 163 pages

Immigrant ProtagonistCaribbeanImmigrationCultural Identity
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In Cuba I Was A German Shepherd

Ana Menendez · 229 pages

ImmigrationImmigrant ProtagonistCaribbeanCultural Identity
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The Kite Runner

Khaled Hosseini · 368 pages

The unforgettable, heartbreaking story of the unlikely friendship between a wealthy boy and the son of his father’s servant, The Kite Runner is a beautifully crafted novel set in a country that is in the process of being destroyed. It is about the power of reading, the price of betrayal, and the possibility of redemption; and an exploration of the power of fathers over sons—their love, their sacri

Immigrant ProtagonistImmigrationCultural IdentityHistorical Fiction
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Ayiti

Roxane Gay · 122 pages

CaribbeanImmigrationImmigrant ProtagonistCultural 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 ProtagonistImmigrationCultural IdentityHistorical Fiction
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Sour Sweet

Timothy Mo · 278 pages

Immigrant ProtagonistImmigrationOrganized CrimeCultural Identity
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What Is the What

Dave Eggers · 475 pages

*What Is the What* is the epic novel based on the life of Valentino Achak Deng who, along with thousands of other children--the so-called Lost Boys--was forced to leave his village in Sudan at the age of seven and trek hundreds of miles by foot, pursued by militias, government bombers, and wild animals, crossing the deserts of three countries to find freedom. When he finally is resettled in the Un

Immigrant ProtagonistImmigrationCultural IdentityLiterary Fiction
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Foreign Soil

Maxine Beneba Clarke · 265 pages

Immigrant ProtagonistImmigrationCaribbeanCultural Identity
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The Fire Horse Girl

Kay Honeyman

When Jade Moon, born in the unlucky year of the Fire Horse, and her father immigrate to America in 1923 and are detained at Angel Island Immigration Station, Jade Moon is determined to find a way through and prove that she is not cursed.

Immigrant ProtagonistImmigrationCultural IdentityOrganized Crime
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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 ProtagonistImmigrationCultural IdentityHistorical Fiction
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As the Earth Turns Silver

Alison Wong · 278 pages

"From the late nineteenth century to the 1920s, from Kwangtung, China to Wellington and Dunedin and the battlefields of the Western Front - a story of two families. Yung faces a new land that does not welcome the Chinese. Alone, Katherine struggles to raise her children and find her place in the world. In a climate of hostility towards the foreign newcomers, Katherine and Yung embark on a poignant

Immigrant ProtagonistImmigrationCultural IdentityHistorical Fiction
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Paradise Reclaimed

Halldor Laxness · 254 pages

ImmigrationImmigrant ProtagonistCultural IdentityHistorical Fiction
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Nowhere in Africa: An Autobiographical Novel

Stefanie Zweig, Marlies Comjean · 303 pages

When the Nazi regime comes to power, Jewish attorney Walter Redlich flees Germany with his family and finds refuge in Kenya, where the family must learn to adapt to their new life.

Immigrant ProtagonistImmigrationCultural IdentityHistorical Fiction
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The Island of Eternal Love

Daina Chaviano · 336 pages

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A Good American

Alex George · 387 pages

The Meisenheimer family struggles to find their place among the colorful residents of their new American hometown, including a giant teenage boy, a pretty schoolteacher whose lessons consist of more than music, and a spiteful, bicycle-riding dwarf.

Immigrant ProtagonistImmigrationCultural IdentityHistorical 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.

CaribbeanImmigrant ProtagonistImmigrationLiterary Fiction
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The Agüero Sisters

Cristina Garcia · 336 pages

CaribbeanImmigrant ProtagonistImmigrationCultural Identity
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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.

Immigrant ProtagonistImmigrationCultural IdentityHistorical Fiction
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