The Other Americans
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3.7 • 3 Ratings
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- £7.99
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- £7.99
Publisher Description
Finalist for the National Book Award 2019
An Observer, Literary Review and Time Book of the Year
'One of the most affecting novels I have read. Subtle, wise and full of humanity' The Times
Late one spring night, Driss Guerraoui, a Moroccan immigrant in California, is walking across a darkened intersection when he is killed by a speeding car. The repercussions of his death bring together a diverse cast of characters, deeply divided by race, religion and class. As the characters tell their stories and the mystery unfolds, Driss's family is forced to confront its secrets, a town faces its hypocrisies, and love, in all its messy and unpredictable forms, is born.
'A state-of-America family saga told as a slow-burn detective story' Observer
'Exceptionally rich' Sunday Times
'Confirms Lalami's reputation as one of our most sensitive interrogators, probing at the faultlines in family and the wider world' Financial Times
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Lalami's powerful third novel, after 2014's Pulitzer Prize finalist The Moor's Account, uses nine narrators to probe the schisms of American community. When Driss Guerraoui is killed in a hit-and-run, his single daughter Nora a struggling composer who survives by substitute teaching leaves Oakland for her parents' home in Yucca Valley. There she navigates her strained relationships with her mother Maryam, who hopes she will abandon music for a law degree, and sister Salma, who unlike Nora chose a conventional path of marriage, children, and a lucrative career. As Nora grapples with grief for her supportive father and pushes the police to find the driver who killed him, her encounters with Jeremy Gorecki, a former elementary school classmate, lead to intimacy she isn't sure she wants. Nora, whose parents emigrated from Morocco in 1981, initially worries that Jeremy, a veteran traumatized by his time in Iraq, represents an American aggression that she fears, even as their relationship deepens. The novel depicts characters who are individually treated differently because of his or her race, religion, or immigration histories, but its focus is the sense of alienation all of them share. In a narrative that succeeds as mystery and love story, family and character study, Lalami captures the complex ways humans can be strangers not just outside their "tribes" but within them, as well as to themselves.
