Immigrants & Refugees

The Fortunes (2016) is a historical novel by British author Peter Ho Davies. Written in the form of four interconnected stories, it details the experiences of various groups of Chinese immigrants and their descendants in the United States. Three of the four stories are based on real, historical figures, and together the narratives form a vast, multi-generational portrait of Chinese American communities across time and in various regions of the US. The four stories take... Read The Fortunes Summary

The Girl Who Smiled Beads: A Story of War and What Comes After is a 2018 memoir by Clemantine Wamariya, who at age six escaped the Rwandan genocide of 1994 with her older sister Claire. The memoir, which is co-authored by Elizabeth Weil, follows a dual narrative that alternates between scenes from Wamariya’s journey through seven African countries and from her life in America, where she moved in 2000. Wamariya describes the dehumanization of refugees... Read The Girl Who Smiled Beads Summary

Sandra Cisneros’s The House on Mango Street is an internationally acclaimed novel, first published in 1984. The story of Esperanza Cordero is told through stunning vignettes that chronicle the life of a young Latina woman growing up in the Hispanic quarter of Chicago. Heralded as an important voice in representing an underserved community, the novel won the American Book Award in 1985. It has since become an integral part of school curriculum across the country... Read The House on Mango Street Summary

Elif Batuman is a contemporary Turkish-American author. She received her BA from Harvard University and PhD in Comparative Literature from Stanford University and spent several years in Turkey as a resident writer at Koç University. Her first novel, The Idiot (2017), as well as her collection of essays, The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them (2010), are auto-biographical in nature and focus on life within US academia. Both titles allude... Read The Idiot Summary

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The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan (1989) follows the stories of four Chinese women who immigrate to America and their American-born daughters. This was Tan’s first novel, a highly-acclaimed New York Times best-seller and winner of the 1989 California Book Award for Fiction. It was adapted into a film in 1993 and was the first wide American film release with a predominantly Asian American cast.Plot SummaryThe Joy Luck Club is divided into four parts... Read The Joy Luck Club Summary

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The Latehomecomer, a memoir by Kao Kalia Yang, was published in 2008. It won the Minnesota Book Award and was a finalist for the PEN USA Literary Award for Nonfiction. Yang was born in Thailand’s Ban Vinai Refugee Camp in 1980 and immigrated to St. Paul, Minnesota when she was six years old. She is a graduate of Carleton College and Columbia University and co-founder of Words Wanted, an organization committed to helping immigrants with... Read The Latehomecomer Summary

The Lemon Tree: An Arab, a Jew, and the Heart of the Middle East is a biography and work of historical nonfiction written by Sandy Tolan and published in 2006. Against the backdrop of the first Arab-Israeli War’s 50th anniversary, American journalist Sandy Tolan traveled to the Middle East to research his assignment. Through the biography, Tolan aims to highlight how two families on opposite sides of the conflict—the Khairis and the Eshkenazis—are connected on... Read The Lemon Tree Summary

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Zeyn Joukhadar is a transgender Syrian American writer (also published under the name Jennifer Zeynab Joukhadar). His first novel, The Map of Salt and Stars (2018), won the 2018 Middle East Book Award in Youth Literature and became a 2018 Goodreads Choice Awards Finalist in Historical Fiction. Comprising two interwoven narratives, the novel follows Nour, the present-day protagonist whose flight from a war-torn Syria parallels the journey of her imaginary heroine—Rawiya, a medieval mapmaker’s apprentice... Read The Map of Salt and Stars Summary

The Mysterious Affair at Styles, written by Agatha Christie in 1920, is the first of her novels to feature Hercule Poirot. The small, fastidious Belgian is one of her most iconic characters and among the most famous fictional detectives in the world. The novel is exemplary of the “cozy mystery,” in which well-heeled figures work out the solutions to complex, puzzle-like murders within comfortable settings. This one takes place during the years of the Great... Read The Mysterious Affair at Styles Summary

The Namesake is a novel by the distinguished American writer Jhumpa Lahiri, who is known for her traditional narrative style often dealing with sensitive issues of immigrant life and culture clash. First published in 2003, this is her first novel, originally published in The New Yorker in shorter form, and it follows an immigrant Bengali family in America and the way its members adapt to a culture and society very different to their own. The... Read The Namesake Summary

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The Other Side of the Sky is the memoir of Farah Ahmedi, written with Tamim Ansary. The following summary and analysis is based on the 2005 paperback edition published by Simon Spotlight Entertainment, an imprint of Simon & Schuster. Ahmedi was born in Afghanistan in 1987 at the height of the war with the Soviet Union. She came to the US in 2002, when she was 14. She had only been in the US a... Read The Other Side of the Sky Summary

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The Refugees is a 2017 collection of short stories by celebrated Vietnamese American author, Viet Thanh Nguyen. Nguyen has written fiction, academic nonfiction, and children’s books, and his novel The Sympathizer won the Pulitzer Prize in 2016. Nguyen received his doctorate in English at the University of California Berkeley, and he currently is a literature professor at the University of Southern California. Nguyen’s scholarship and literary works focus on the experiences of Vietnamese communities in... Read The Refugees Summary