Washoe County Library System

From the Pulitzer Prize finalist and author of The Moors Account, here is a timely and powerful novel about the suspicious death of a Moroccan immigrantat once a family saga, a murder mystery, and a love story, informed by the treacherous fault lines of American culture. Late one spring night, Driss Guerraoui, a Moroccan immigrant living in California, is walking across a darkened intersection when he is killed by a speeding car. The repercussions...

"Holding Pattern is a novel about immigration and belonging, mother-daughter relationships, and the many ways we can learn to hold each other. At 28, Kathleen Cheng returns home to live with her single mother, Marissa, an immigrant from China. Her mother,to Katheen's surprise, is in love, and Kathleen helps her mother plan her wedding to a tech entrepreneur. Kathleen takes a job working for an unusual start-up, and as mother and daughter peel back...

"Eighteen-year-old Shelley, born into a much-despised branch of the Zheng family in Yunnan Province and living in the shadow of his widowed father's grief, dreams of bigger things. Buoyed by an exuberant heart and his cousin Deng's tall tales about the United States, Shelley heads to San Francisco to claim his destiny, confident that any hurdles will be easily overcome by the awesome powers of the "Chinese groove," a belief in the unspoken bonds between...

"From rediscovering an ancestral village in China to experiencing the realities of American life as a Nigerian, the search for belonging crosses borders and generations. Selected from the archives of Catapult magazine, the essays in A Map Is Only One Story highlight the human side of immigration policies and polarized rhetoric, as twenty writers share provocative personal stories of existing between languages and cultures. Victoria Blanco relates...

"One night they came ... The darkness grew colder, deeper, darker, and swallowed up everything ... Marwan is a young boy on a journey he never intended to take, bound for a place he doesn't know. On his journey, he relies on courage and memories of his faraway homeland to buoy him. With him are hundreds and thousands of other human beings, crossing the deserts and the seas, fleeing war and hunger in search of safety. He must take one step after another--bringing...

"With compassion and clarity, David Miliband shows why we should care about the refugee crisis and how we can make a difference. He takes us from war zones in the Middle East to peaceful suburbs in America to explain the crisis and show what can be done, not just by governments with the power to change policy but by citizens with the urge to change lives. His innovative and practical call to action shows that the crisis need not overwhelm us. Miliband...

Betrayed by the boss who is also the father of her unborn child, an undocumented Chinese factory worker is forced to flee and reinvent herself in San Francisco's Chinatown in the desperate hopes of securing American citizenship for her baby. "In a powerful debut novel about motherhood, immigration, and identity, a pregnant Chinese woman makes her way to California and stakes a claim to the American dream. Holed up with other moms-to-be in a secret...

In this story based on true events, a treasured wooden chair is passed down from family to family, with each new owner carving the word "welcome" in a new language.

"When Carmen Vega's boyfriend tries to kill her, she hands over all her savings to a smuggler and sets out from Tijuana in a small, leaky boat. Within sight of the California coast, the boat starts to sink, and its passengers have to be rescued by border patrol. Soon, Carmen turns up dead in a privately-operated Migrant Detention Center. Neither Nick Finn, the officer who saved Carmen from drowning, or his wife, human-rights lawyer Mona Jimenez, are...

Describes the flood of immigration into the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, focusing on the experiences of the youngest immigrants, both on their journeys and in their new country.