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The other Americans, Laila Lalami

eng

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novels

The other Americans

Laila Lalami

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: Guerraoui's daughter Nora, a jazz composer who returns to the small town in the Mojave she thought she'd left for good; his widow Maryam, who still pines after her life in the old country; Efrain, an undocumented witness whose fear of deportation prevents him from coming forward; Jeremy, a former classmate of Nora's and now a veteran of the Iraq war; Coleman, a detective who is slowly discovering her son's secrets; Anderson, a neighbour trying to reconnect with his family; and Driss himself. As the characters - deeply divided by race, religion and class - tell their stories Driss' family is forced to confront its secrets, a town faces its hypocrisies - and love, in all its unpredictable forms, is born

adult