Preparation for the Next Life

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

The Pawnbroker

Edward Lewis Wallant · 274 pages

For most of us, remembering the Holocaust requires effort; we listen to stories, watch films, read histories. But the people who came to be called "survivors" could not avoid their memories. Sol Nazerman, protagonist of Edward Lewis Wallant's The Pawnbroker, is one such sufferer. At 45, Nazerman, who survived Bergen-Belsen although his wife and children did not, runs a Harlem pawnshop. But the ope

Little Bee

Chris Cleave · 288 pages

A haunting novel about the tenuous friendship that blooms between two disparate strangers--one an illegal Nigerian refugee, the other a recent widow from suburban London.

Under This Unbroken Sky

Shandi Mitchell · 354 pages

The story of an immigrant family trying to build a life in an unforgiving new world, Under This Unbroken Sky is a mesmerizing and absorbing first novel of love and greed, pride and desperation. Award-winning writer Shandi Mitchell based this evocative and compelling narrative of struggle and survival on the Canadian prairie on her own family history. Evocative and compelling, rich in imagination a

Sour Heart

Jenny Zhang · 310 pages

Foreign Gods, Inc.

Okey Ndibe · 341 pages

"Foreign Gods, Inc., tells the story of Ike, a New York-based Nigerian cab driver who sets out to steal the statue of an ancient war deity from his home village and sell it to a New York gallery. Ike's plan is fueled by desperation. Despite a degree in economics from a major American college, his strong accent has barred him from the corporate world. Forced to eke out a living as a cab driver, he

Mudbound

Hillary Jordan · 335 pages

"It is 1946, and city-bred Laura McAllan is trying to raise her children on her husband's Mississippi Delta farm; a place she finds foreign and frightening. In the midst of the family's struggles, two young men return from the war to work the land. Jamie McAllan, Laura's brother-in-law, is everything her husband is not; charming, handsome, and haunted by his memories of combat. Ronsel Jackson, eld

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

Christ in Concrete

Pietro Di Donato · 240 pages

Amerika

Franz Kafka · 299 pages

"Franz Kafka's diaries and letters suggest that his fascination with America grew out of a desire to break away from his native Prague, even if only in his imagination. Kafka died before he could finish what he liked to call his ''American novel," but he clearly entitled it Der Verschollene ("The Missing Person") in a letter to his fiancee, Felice Bauer, in 1912. Kafka began writing the novel that

Vita

Melania G. Mazzucco · 433 pages

Arriving at Ellis Island, two poor children from Southern Italy, Diamante, age twelve, and Vita, age nine, struggle to surive in New York City amid the poverty, opportunity, and crime of Italy.

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.

Bread Givers: A Novel

Anzia Yezierska · 297 pages

A young Jewish girl from New York's Lower East Side rebels against the tyranny and chauvinism of her immigrant father, determined to assert her freedom and independence.

Brooklyn

Colm Toibin · 262 pages

In Ireland in the early 1950s, Eilis Lacey is one of many who cannot find work at home. Thus when a job is offered in America, it is clear to everyone that she must go. Leaving behind her family and country, Eilis heads for unfamiliar Brooklyn, and to a crowded boarding house where the landlady's intense scrutiny and the small jealousies of her fellow residents only deepen her isolation. Slowly, t

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,

Dogs at the Perimeter

Madeleine Thien · 253 pages

A Montreal woman searches for her friend, Hiroji, a neurologist, and the story of his and his brother's past unlocks buried memories of Cambodia, of her separation from her family under the Khmer Rouge, and her harrowing journey of escape from the "rehabilitation" camp where her mother and brother were taken with others.

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

Out of This Furnace

Thomas Bell

Enemies: A Love Story

Isaac Bashevis Singer · 280 pages

Almost before he knows it, Herman Broder, refugee and survivor of World War II, has three wives; Yadwiga, the Polish peasant who hid him from the Nazis; Masha , his beautiful and neurotic true love; and Tamara, his first wife, miraculously returned from the dead. Astonished by each new complication, and yet resigned to a life of evasion, Herman navigates a crowded, Yiddish New York with a sense of

The Jungle

Upton Sinclair · 342 pages

Upton Sinclair's dramatic and deeply moving story exposed the brutal conditions in the Chicago stockyards at the turn of the nineteenth century and brought into sharp moral focus the appalling odds against which immigrants and other working people struggled for their share of the American dream. Denounced by the conservative press as an un-American libel on the meatpacking industry, the book was c

Girl in Translation

Jean Kwok · 293 pages

Broken Glass Park

Alina Bronsky · 221 pages

Seventeen-year-old Sacha Naimann dreams of writing a novel about her mother and killing the man who murdered her, Sacha's stepfather Vadim, while struggling to care for her younger siblings and leave behind her painful childhood.

The Pugilist at Rest

Thom Jones · 240 pages

14 stories grouped into four parts: the horrors of Vietnam; men at war with women; the difficulties of divorce, mental defects, and the ravages of cancer; and battling epilepsy and alcoholism.

Shards

Ismet Prcic · 392 pages

Ismet Prcic’s brilliant, provocative, and propulsively energetic debut is about a young Bosnian, also named Ismet Prcic, who has fled his war-torn homeland and is now struggling to reconcile his past with his present life in California. He is advised that in order to make peace with the corrosive guilt he harbors over leaving behind his family behind, he must “write everything.” The result is a