Lalami, Laila
From the Pulitzer Prize finalist
author of The Moor's Account--a timely and powerful new novel about the suspicious death of a Moroccan immigrant that is at once a family saga
a murder mystery
and a love story
all of it informed by the treacherous fault lines of American culture. Nora Guerraoui
a jazz composer
returns home to a small town in the Mojave after hearing that her father
owner of a popular restaurant there
has been killed in a suspicious hit-and-run car accident. Told by multiple narrators--Nora herself
Jeremy (the Iraq war veteran with whom she develops an intimacy)
widow Maryam
Efrain (an immigrant witness to the accident who refuses to get involved for fear of deportation)
Coleman (the police investigator)
and Driss (the dead man himself)
The Other Americans deftly explores one family's secrets and hypocrisies even as it offers a portrait of Americans riven by race
class
and religion
living side by side
yet ignorant of the vicissitudes that each tribe
as it were
faces.