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If you'd like personalized book recommendations, check out our Tailored Titles services for both fiction and nonfiction books. |
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The Limits of the Worldby Jennifer M AckerThe Chandaria family - emigrants from the Indian-enclave of Nairobi - have managed to flourish in America. Premchand, the father, is a doctor who has worked doggedly to grow his practice and give his family security; his wife, Urmila, runs a business importing artisanal Kenyan crafts; and their son, Sunil, after quitting the pre-med track, is enrolled in a PhD program in philosophy at Harvard. But the parents have kept a very important secret from Sunil: his cousin, Bimal, is actually his older brother. And when this previously hidden history is revealed by an unforeseen accident, and the entire family is forced to return to Nairobi, Sunil reveals his own well-kept, explosive secret: his Jewish-American girlfriend, who has accompanied him to Kenya, is, in fact, already his wife.
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Americanah
by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Separated by differing ambitions after falling in love in occupied Nigeria, beautiful Ifemelu experiences triumph and defeat in America, while Obinze endures an undocumented status in London until the pair is reunited in their homeland fifteen years later.
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Panic in a Suitcase
by Yelena Akhtiorskaya
In this account of two decades in the life of an immigrant household, the fall of communism and the rise of globalization are artfully reflected in the experience of a single family. Ironies, subtle and glaring, are revealed: the Nasmertovs left Odessa for Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, with a huge sense of finality, only to find that the divide between the old world and the new is not nearly as clear-cut as they thought. The dissolution of the Soviet Union makes returning just a matter of a plane ticket, and the Russian-owned shops in their adopted neighborhood stock even the most obscure comforts of home. Pursuing the American Dream once meant giving up everything, but does the dream still work if the past is always within reach? If the Nasmertov parents can afford only to look forward, learning the rules of aspiration, the family's youngest, Frida, can only look back.
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Honolulu
by Alan Brennert
Journeying to 1914 Hawaii as a mail-order "picture bride," Korean-born Jin finds her hopes for education and a better life devastated by the realities of a rushed marriage to an embittered laborer, a situation throughout which she works to overcome limited opportunities and prejudice in order to improve circumstances for her fellow brides.
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The Wangs vs. the World
by Jade Chang
A wealthy but fractured Chinese family loses everything in the financial crisis before embarking on a haphazard but ultimately redemptive journey across America as part of an effort to reclaim ancestral lands in China.
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House of Sand and Fog
by Andre Dubus
When a former colonel of the Iranian Air Force and his family purchase a small California home at auction, they are faced with a great conflict as the former owner and her police officer boyfriend fight to get it back at any cost.
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The Veins of the Ocean
by Patricia Engel
Blaming herself for the horrifying crime that has landed her brother on death row, Reina moves to a sleepy Florida Keys community, where, through a friendship with an exiled Cuban, she gains understanding about her own connection to the life-giving and destructive forces of the ocean.
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A Good American
by Alex George
The Meisenheimer family struggle to find their place among the colorful residents of their new American hometown, including a giant teenage boy, a pretty schoolteacher whose lessons consist of more than just music and an spiteful, bicycle-riding dwarf.
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The Seven or Eight Deaths of Stella Fortuna
by Juliet Grames
Believed cursed in her rugged Italian village, a tough, intelligent teen protects her younger sister during World War II, enduring challenges that transform her views about survival and independence.
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Miracle Creek
by Angie Kim
A dramatic murder trial in the aftermath of an experimental medical treatment and a fatal explosion upends a rural Virginia community where personal secrets and private ambitions complicate efforts to uncover what happened.
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The Namesake
by Jhumpa Lahiri
Meet the Ganguli family, new arrivals from Calcutta, trying their best to become Americans even as they pine for home. The name they bestow on their firstborn, Gogol, betrays all the conflicts of honoring tradition in a new world--conflicts that will haunt Gogol on his own winding path through divided loyalties, comic detours, and wrenching love affairs.
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Lost Children Archive
by Valeria Luiselli
A mother and father set out with their kids from New York to Arizona. In their used Volvo - and with their ten-year-old son trying out his new Polaroid camera - the family is heading for the Apacheria: the region the Apaches once called home, and where the ghosts of Geronimo and Cochise might still linger. The father, a sound documentarist, hopes to gather an "inventory of echoes" from this historic, mythic place. The mother, a radio journalist, becomes consumed by the news she hears on the car radio, about the thousands of children trying to reach America but getting stranded at the southern border, held in detention centers, or being sent back to their homelands, to an unknown fate. But as the family drives farther west - through Virginia to Tennessee, across Oklahoma and Texas - we sense they are on the brink of a crisis of their own. A fissure is growing between the parents, one the children can feel beneath their feet. They are led, inexorably, to a grand, unforgettable adventure - both in the harsh desert landscape and within the chambers of their own imaginations.
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Behold the Dreamers
by Imbolo Mbue
An immigrant working class couple from Cameroon and the upper class American family for whom they work find their lives and marriages shaped by financial circumstances, infidelities, secrets, and the 2008 recession.
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We are Called to Rise
by Laura McBride
An immigrant youth struggling to assimilate, a middle-aged housewife with a troubled marriage, a Vegas social worker and a wounded soldier connect with each other and rescue themselves in the wake of an unthinkable incident.
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A Place for Us
by Fatima Farheen Mirza
A story of family identity and belonging follows an Indian family through the marriage of their daughter, from the parents' arrival in the United States to the return of their estranged son.
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The Refugees
by Viet Thanh Nguyen
The Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Sympathizer presents a new collection of stories, written over a 20-year period, which explores questions of home, family, immigration, the American experience and the relationships and desires for self-fulfillment that define our lives.
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The Latecomers
by Helen Klein Ross
Forced to give up her baby for adoption after the death of her husband in 1908, an Irish teen takes a maid's job at a sprawling New England estate before a mysterious death reveals a five-generation secret.
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American Street
by Ibi Aanu Zoboi
On the corner of American Street and Joy Road, Fabiola Toussaint thought she would finally find une belle vie--a good life. But after they leave Port-au-Prince, Haiti, Fabiola's mother is detained by U.S. immigration, leaving Fabiola to navigate her loud American cousins, Chantal, Donna, and Princess; the grittiness of Detroit's west side; a new school; and a surprising romance, all on her own. Just as she finds her footing in this strange new world, a dangerous proposition presents itself, and Fabiola soon realizes that freedom comes at a cost. Trapped at the crossroads of an impossible choice, will she pay the price for the American dream?
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Avon Lake Public Library 32649 Electric Blvd. Avon Lake, Ohio 44012 440-933-8128alpl.org |
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