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Americanah
Ifemelu goes from Nigeria to the United States and starts writing about race. Obinze, who thought he would join her, ends up living without papers in London. Read Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie for the two sharply different lives they build abroad and the awkwardness of finding each other again in Nigeria.
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I Leave It Up to You
Jack Jr. wakes from a two-year coma to find his advertising job and Manhattan apartment gone. He goes back to his Korean American family’s struggling sushi restaurant in Fort Lee, New Jersey. Read Jinwoo Chong for the dry comedy of a homecoming where the most consequential family conversations happen over crates of fish before dawn.
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How Not to Drown in a Glass of Water (2022)
8.0/10on Open Library
Published
Dominican immigrant Cara Romero loses her job making lamps during the Great Recession. Over a series of sessions, she tells her employment counselor about her neighbors, her family, and the life she already knows how to manage. Angie Cruz lets one gloriously digressive voice test how much of a life can fit into a job interview.
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Arsonists' City (2021)
Published
In The Arsonists’ City, Mazna calls her children back to Beirut when their father, Idris, wants to sell the family house. Hala Alyan follows what the siblings bring with them and then goes back to the choices that first scattered the family. Choose it for a reunion where the argument over what to keep changes as you hear each side.
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Identitti (2021)
Published
Nivedita, a doctoral student who blogs with advice from the goddess Kali, praises her professor on the radio. Then she learns that the professor, who claimed to be Indian, is white. Read Mithu Sanyal for campus satire with room for a student to be mortified, angry, and funny in the same conversation. Translated from German by Alta L. Price.
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The Namesake (2003)
Published
Gogol’s Bengali parents give him the name of his father’s favorite Russian writer. At first he resists changing it for school, then he starts to wish he had. Jhumpa Lahiri follows him through work and relationships, while his mother Ashima makes her own life in the United States. Read it for how differently the same family can feel about home.
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All This Could Be Different (2022)
4.0/10on Open Library
Published
An entry-level job in Milwaukee lets Sneha help friends nearby and send money to her parents in India. When jobs and apartments become precarious, her friend Tig proposes a different way for them to get by. Read Sarah Thankam Mathews for the friendships and romances that take shape while everyone is doing the arithmetic.
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Behold the Dreamers (Oprah's Book Club): A Novel (2016)
5.3/10on Open Library
Published
In Behold the Dreamers, Jende Jonga, a Cameroonian immigrant in Harlem, gets a job driving a Lehman Brothers executive. His wife Neni gets temporary work at the executive’s summer house. Read Imbolo Mbue for what two employees learn through working for the same family, and for how much changes when the very people who pay them lose their footing.
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The Wrong End of the Telescope (2021)
8.0/10on Open Library
Published
Mina Simpson, a Lebanese doctor long out of touch with most of her family, travels to Lesbos to help a friend at a refugee camp. There she meets a Syrian mother who wants to keep her terminal diagnosis from her family. Rabih Alameddine finds humor and tension in what a doctor can offer when a patient’s priorities are elsewhere.
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My Cat Yugoslavia (2014)
8.0/10on Open Library
Published
Bekim grows up in Finland after his family flees Yugoslavia. A talking cat he meets in a gay bar moves in with him and his pet boa constrictor. Read Pajtim Statovci for the way this strange household makes room for a story about the family history Bekim has kept at a distance. Translated from Finnish by David Hackston.
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The Tiny Things Are Heavier
Sommy leaves Nigeria for graduate school in the United States. She later takes Bryan to Lagos, where she hopes to reconcile with her brother and he wants to meet the father who left him behind. Read Esther Ifesinachi Okonkwo for the intimacy and friction of two people making the same trip for very different reasons.
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Brother (2017)
Published
In a housing complex outside Toronto, Michael and Francis grow up while their mother, who came from Trinidad, works long shifts. Francis takes Michael to his crew’s barbershop and dreams of a future in music. Read David Chariandy for the life that can gather in a single room, and for how much a younger brother notices without knowing what it means yet.
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Chemistry (2017)
6.0/10on Open Library
Published
The unnamed narrator is a chemistry PhD student with long hours in the lab, Chinese parents she wants to satisfy, and a marriage proposal she can’t answer. Read Weike Wang for the very dry humor of a scientist trying to be precise about feelings that resist the habits of her training.
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Interior Chinatown (2020)
9.0/10on Open Library
Published
Actor Willis Wu goes from a tiny rented room in Chinatown to a cop-show set in a restaurant. The part he usually gets is Generic Asian Man. Charles Yu uses a screenplay’s form to give the actor room to notice who gets a starring role, who stays in the background, and what that means for telling his own family’s story.
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Butter Honey Pig Bread (2020)
Published
Twin sisters Kehinde and Taiye spend years apart before returning to Lagos. Kehinde has tried to remake her life in Montreal, and Taiye has found consolation in cooking. Read Francesca Ekwuyasi for the weight of an ordinary act of care after a long estrangement, when a meal can carry more than someone is able to say.
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Martyr! (2024)
8.0/10on Open Library
Published
Cyrus Shams is a newly sober poet whose Iranian father worked killing chickens at a Midwestern factory farm. His questions about his mother lead him toward a painter spending her last days in a Brooklyn museum. Read Kaveh Akbar for the puzzled, hopeful way Cyrus looks to art for answers he can no longer get from his family.
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These Impossible Things (2022)
Published
Kees is in love with a man she feels she can’t tell her parents about. When her friendship with Malak and Jenna fractures, Malak goes to Cairo to reconnect with her family. Read Salma El-Wardany for how much the three friends usually understand about each other, and how painful it is when that trust fails.
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Djinns (2024)
Published
After decades of work in Germany, Hüseyin dies just as he finally buys an apartment in Istanbul. His family comes together there, and their accounts of the same family history carry different ideas about where they belong. Read Fatma Aydemir for the six perspectives a single home can hold. Translated from German by Jon Cho-Polizzi.
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Hustle, Baby
Dilo is a teenager helping her Tamil refugee family make ends meet after they flee the Sri Lankan civil war. There’s school, a baby cousin to look after, and the promise of quick money from an aspiring day trader. Priya Guns gives the hustle a very funny, impatient voice and keeps track of who has to bear the loss if the gamble fails.
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New Skin
Linli returns after years of estrangement to care for her mother, Fanny, a Chinese immigrant who has signed up for a reality show promising reconstructive surgery. Read Sarah Wang for the dark comedy of two women with different ideas about who should get to decide what Fanny does with her own face.
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The leavers (2014)
7.0/10on Open Library
Published
Deming’s mother Polly leaves for work at a nail salon and never comes home. An adoptive family takes him from the Bronx to a small town upstate and gives him a new name. Read Lisa Ko for the way the stories of mother and son complicate what each remembers about the life they shared.
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