Books with category Immigrant Stories
Displaying 6 books

A Season of Light

2025

by Julie Iromuanya

For fans of Behold the Dreamers, immigrant stories, and family sagas, this compelling novel revolves around a tightly bound Nigerian family living in Florida, exploring the wounds passed down from generation to generation.

When 276 schoolgirls are abducted from their school in Nigeria, Fidelis Ewerike, a Florida-based barrister, poet, and former POW of the Nigerian Civil War, begins to go mad. He is consumed by memories of his younger sister Ugochi, who went missing during that conflict. Overwhelmed by survivor’s guilt and fearful for his sixteen-year-old daughter Amara, who bears an uncanny resemblance to Ugochi, Fidelis locks her in her bedroom, offering no words of explanation, only lovingly—if poorly—made meals and sweets.

As the family spirals into chaos, his wife Adaobi seeks the counsel of a preacher, praying for liberation from what she believes is a curse plaguing their family since leaving Nigeria. Meanwhile, fourteen-year-old Chuk battles with neighborhood boys, learning harsh lessons about force, masculinity, and his tenuous position within the family.

Rebellious and resentful, Amara longs for freedom. When she escapes her imprisonment, she falls in love with Maksym Kostyk, the son of the town drunk, rather than the Aba-born engineer-in-training her mother had hoped for. Together, they plan to run away from their familial traumas.

A Season of Light is an all-consuming masterpiece by Julie Iromuanya. To peer into the Ewerike family’s lives is a profound gift.

Behold the Dreamers

2016

by Imbolo Mbue

Behold the Dreamers is a compulsively readable debut novel about marriage, immigration, class, race, and the trapdoors in the American Dream. It tells the unforgettable story of a young Cameroonian couple making a new life in New York just as the Great Recession upends the economy.

Jende Jonga, a Cameroonian immigrant living in Harlem, has come to the United States to provide a better life for himself, his wife, Neni, and their six-year-old son. In the fall of 2007, Jende can hardly believe his luck when he lands a job as a chauffeur for Clark Edwards, a senior executive at Lehman Brothers. Clark demands punctuality, discretion, and loyalty—and Jende is eager to please. Clark’s wife, Cindy, even offers Neni temporary work at the Edwardses’ summer home in the Hamptons.

With these opportunities, Jende and Neni can at last gain a foothold in America and imagine a brighter future. However, the world of great power and privilege conceals troubling secrets, and soon Jende and Neni notice cracks in their employers’ façades. When the financial world is rocked by the collapse of Lehman Brothers, the Jongas are desperate to keep Jende’s job—even as their marriage threatens to fall apart. As all four lives are dramatically upended, Jende and Neni are forced to make an impossible choice.

Honor

2013

by Elif Shafak

Honor is a powerful novel by internationally bestselling Turkish author, Elif Shafak. Set against the backdrop of 1970s London, this dramatic tale delves into the lives of Turkish immigrants as they navigate love, family, and cultural misunderstandings.

The story follows twin sisters born in a Kurdish village. Jamila remains in the village, embracing her role as a midwife, while Pembe ventures to London with her Turkish husband, Adem, in search of a new life. In London, they face a pivotal choice: remain loyal to their old traditions or attempt to assimilate into a new culture.

When Adem abandons the family, their eldest son, Iskender, steps up to protect the family's honor. As Pembe embarks on a chaste affair with Elias, Iskender learns the heart-wrenching truth that love can coexist with the potential for deep hurt.

Honor is a gripping exploration of guilt and innocence, loyalty and betrayal, and the trials faced by immigrants. It is a poignant reflection on the love and heartbreak that often fracture families.

Girl in Translation

2010

by Jean Kwok

Introducing a fresh, exciting Chinese-American voice, an inspiring debut about an immigrant girl forced to choose between two worlds and two futures. When Kimberly Chang and her mother emigrate from Hong Kong to Brooklyn squalor, she quickly begins a secret double life: exceptional schoolgirl during the day, Chinatown sweatshop worker in the evenings. Disguising the more difficult truths of her life—like the staggering degree of her poverty, the weight of her family's future resting on her shoulders, or her secret love for a factory boy who shares none of her talent or ambition—Kimberly learns to constantly translate not just her language but herself back and forth between the worlds she straddles.

Through Kimberly's story, author Jean Kwok, who also emigrated from Hong Kong as a young girl, brings to the page the lives of countless immigrants who are caught between the pressure to succeed in America, their duty to their family, and their own personal desires, exposing a world that we rarely hear about. Written in an indelible voice that dramatizes the tensions of an immigrant girl growing up between two cultures, surrounded by a language and world only half understood, Girl in Translation is an unforgettable and classic novel of an American immigrant-a moving tale of hardship and triumph, heartbreak and love, and all that gets lost in translation.

The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears

2008

by Dinaw Mengestu

Seventeen years ago, Sepha Stephanos fled the Ethiopian Revolution after witnessing soldiers brutally beat his father. Selling off his parents' jewelry, he paid for passage to the United States. Now, he finds himself running a grocery store in a poor African-American neighborhood in Washington, D.C. His only companions are two fellow African immigrants who share his feelings of frustration and bitter nostalgia for their home continent.

He realizes that his life has turned out completely different and far more isolated from the one he had imagined for himself years ago. Soon, Sepha's neighborhood begins to change. Hope comes in the form of new neighbors—Judith and Naomi, a white woman and her biracial daughter—who become his friends and remind him of what having a family is like for the first time in years.

But when the neighborhood's newfound calm is disturbed by a series of racial incidents, Sepha may lose everything all over again. Told in a haunting and powerful first-person narration, the novel casts the streets of Washington, D.C., and Addis Ababa through Sepha's eyes. The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears is a deeply affecting and unforgettable debut novel about what it means to lose a family and a country—and what it takes to create a new home.

Captains and the Kings

1983

by Taylor Caldwell

"Captains and the Kings" is a sweeping and captivating novel about the amassing of a colossal fortune, the political power that comes with it, and the operation of a curse laid on an Irish-American dynasty and the ruthless driving man who founded it.

Joseph Francis Xavier Armagh was thirteen years old when he first saw America through a dirty porthole on the steerage deck of The Irish Queen. It was the early 1850s, and he was a penniless immigrant, an orphan cast on a hostile shore to make a home for himself and his younger brother and infant sister. Some seventy years later, from his deathbed, Joseph Armagh last glimpsed his adopted land from the gleaming windows of a palatial estate. A multi-millionaire, one of the most powerful and feared men, Joseph Armagh had indeed found a home.

Captains and the Kings is the story of the price that was paid for it in the consuming, single-minded determination of a man clawing his way to the top; in the bitter-sweet bliss of the love of a beautiful woman; in the almost too-late enjoyment of extraordinary children; and in the curse which used the hand of fate to strike in the very face of success itself.

Once again, Taylor Caldwell has looked into America's roistering past as a setting for a drama of the consequences of savage ambition - and its meaning then and now.

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