Immigrants & Refugees

Anne Fadiman’s nonfiction book The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down: A Hmong Child, Her American Doctors, and the Collision of Two Cultures chronicles the life of Lia Lee, a Hmong girl who lives with her family in Merced, California, in the 1980s and 1990s. The book examines the cultural misunderstandings and conflicting belief systems that result in Lia’s poor medical treatment after she is diagnosed with a severe form of epilepsy, Lennox-Gastaut Syndrome... Read The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down Summary

The Tattooed Soldier (1998) is a novel written by author and journalist Héctor Tobar. Tobar worked for the LA Times at the time of the 1992 Los Angeles riots, and his work covering that event contributed to a Pulitzer Prize. This experience directly informs this novel, which is set in LA in the weeks prior to the riots, as well as in Guatemala. Much of Tobar’s work focuses on the relationship between the United States... Read The Tattooed Soldier Summary

Published in 1995, The Tortilla Curtain by T. C. Boyle tells the story of two couples living parallel lives in Southern California: Delaney and Kyra Mossbacher, affluent white Americans with a home in the upper-middle-class subdivision of Arroyo Blanco; and Cándido and América Rincón, undocumented immigrants from Mexico living in a makeshift camp at the bottom of the canyon. Rotating among the perspectives of the four protagonists, the novel explores the inequality inherent in the United States... Read The Tortilla Curtain Summary

Shirley Hazzard (1931-2016) was an Australian novelist and United Nations worker who settled in the United States. The Transit of Venus (1980) is Hazzard’s third novel and the winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction. It draws upon Hazzard’s own experiences of an Australian childhood, emigrating abroad, and being part of the first generation of working women. Critics responded to the juxtaposition of intimate, personal narratives with a broader examination of what... Read The Transit of Venus Summary

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Nadine Gordimer’s “The Ultimate Safari” is a short story about a family’s journey from their demolished home in war-torn Mozambique to a refugee camp in South Africa. The story is set in 1988 amid the backdrop of a civil war, which neighboring South Africa supported by the funding of rebel forces. Gordimer, a white South African, was deeply critical of her nation’s involvement, and she tells the story of a young, unnamed refugee girl as... Read The Ultimate Safari Summary

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The Ungrateful Refugee: What Immigrants Never Tell You is a 2019 memoir by novelist Dina Nayeri. It is her first nonfiction book and a finalist for the Kirkus Prize, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and the Clara Johnson Award for Women’s Literature. While Nayeri chronicles her childhood escape from post-revolution Iran and her struggle to build an identity, she interweaves modern tales of refugees mired in uncaring asylum systems.SummaryThe author and first-person narrator of... Read The Ungrateful Refugee Summary

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Under the Mesquite by Guadalupe Garcia McCall is a coming-of-age story about the importance of family, heritage, and perseverance. This young adult novel comes directly from McCall’s own experiences as a young Mexican immigrant, a writer with a dream, and a teenager who watches her mother die from cancer. Under the Mesquite infuses poetic form, free verse, imagery, and sprinkles of the Spanish language in order to portray a bildungsroman in which a young girl... Read Under The Mesquite Summary

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We Need New Names is a work of fiction by Zimbabwean author NoViolet Bulawayo. It’s her debut novel, which garnered critical praise upon its publication in 2013. Bulawayo’s narrative centers around 10-year-old Darling and her group of friends, in a Zimbabwean shantytown called Paradise, as the group perceptively observes life around them. When Darling later moves to America (a hope she’s long had), she’s confronted with the America of her dreams as it clashes with... Read We Need New Names Summary