That greasy spoon diner, for instance, that the hardworking Driss owned and turned into a tourist attraction, sits next to another relic of Americana, a dilapidated bowling alley, owned by an old white guy who's predictably bitter that the 1950s have come and gone and left him in the dust.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. Sometimes that frustration sours into resentment of the other. One of the only things that unites these various characters is that they all feel squeezed economically. That's a very quick aerial view of the sprawling plot here. As Nora observes, death has a way of 'disturb long-established patterns.' Along the way, Jeremy becomes attracted to Nora and she, sort of, reciprocates.

But it's another man - a sheriff's deputy named Jeremy, who's also an Iraq War vet and a former classmate of Nora's - who finally cracks the case in a completely unexpected turn of events. There's one witness to the hit-and-run, an undocumented man who's terrified of coming forward and being deported to Mexico. He starts to cross a darkened intersection to get to his car when he's fatally hit by another car that doesn't stop.Īuthor Interviews 9 First-Person Perspectives Give Voice To 'The Other Americans' Late one night, a Moroccan immigrant named Driss Guerraoui closes up his diner in a small town in the Mojave Desert. Like so many other American novels, from The Great Gatsby to The Bonfire of the Vanities and beyond, The Other Americans uses the device of a car accident to throw together characters who wouldn't otherwise run into each other.

Every short chapter here is narrated by a rotating cast of characters, each of them sealed off from one another by misunderstanding and sometimes justifiable fear.Īll of this makes for a somewhat ungainly novel, and, yet, whenever these separate stories intersect and the characters find common ground, the effect is heartening: You feel like the promise of America can still come through after all. Lalami conjures up a murder mystery, a cross-cultural romance, an immigrant saga, war stories and family dramas. The Other Americans is an ambitious political novel that relies on old-fashioned storytelling to get its messages across. Laila Lalami's new novel is called The Other Americans and it's likely to jump start some timely book group discussions about the American experiment specifically, about how different types of people feel less visible in this country because of their ethnicity, class, race or citizenship status.

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