The best recent novels featuring voices of immigrants

Cara Romero’s unique and vibrant voice stayed with me long after I finished the book. Like all immigrants, she’s caught between two worlds. She’s bound to the parents she left behind in her native Dominican Republic, and she cares for her family and friends in Washington Heights, New York. She’s a flawed character who grows during the story because, as she explains, she doesn’t want to hurt anyone. As a parent, I felt for Cara and her estranged son Fernando, separated by vast cultural differences. This is a heartwarming story, where Cara’s compassionate voice is juxtaposed with the bureaucratic lingo of government forms, emphasizing her humanity and the complex lives of immigrants everywhere.

This riveting whodunit captures the tension between native and naturalized citizens, something I’m familiar with. A Moroccan American man is killed in a hit-and-run in a small desert town in California. His daughter Nora returns home to the Mojave, determined to find the killer. The story is told through multiple voices, some of them immigrants: Nora’s mom, who still dreams of her old life in Casablanca; an undocumented man who witnessed the incident but is afraid to come forward; and the victim himself in the days before dying, when his future looked bright. The secrets Nora discovers about her family and her town, heartbreaking as they are, help her find love and also a sense of home that immigrants like me spend our entire lives trying to reach.

The daughter of Taiwanese immigrants, Tam is on the phone with her husband when he is killed in traffic. Their last conversation is about the little boy they were going to adopt from China. Mia, an undocumented Chinese immigrant with an American-born daughter, tells the other half of the story. Reading about Chinese orphanages in the 90s—and now—was heartbreaking. It was also moving because of the way some nannies cared for the abandoned children. In Chinese mythology, the red thread of fate unites through love. Drawing from the author’s Taiwanese culture and her experience adopting her son from China, this is a story about love: between parents and children, friends who help each other, caretakers and orphans—and even unexpected romance.

This story spoke to my frustration with harsh immigration policies separating families. Talia is American-born, but her Columbian parents, Elena and Mauro, are undocumented. Her sister is also undocumented, while her brother is an American citizen who hopes to secure his family’s future—somehow—when he's 21. Mauro’s life was destroyed when he was deported away from Elena and the children. Talia, who lives with her grandmother in Colombia, ends up in a correctional facility. She escapes, hoping to return to the US. This family belongs together, but for now their dream is kept alive by Andean myths of condors flying free. A moving story of love and danger about parents and children struggling to build normal lives that are always just out of reach.

In this gripping courtroom drama, an explosion in Miracle Creek, Virginia, destroys the business of South Korean immigrants Pak and Young Yoo and puts their daughter Mary into a monthslong coma. As arguments mount against the woman accused of starting the fire, Young struggles with a question many immigrants must face. Maybe she shouldn’t have brought her child to the US, where Mary struggles as a teenager and where she was almost killed. The tension between the two generations resonated with me as a parent and immigrant. As Young hopes to discover who caused the explosion that killed two other people, she must also help Mary imagine a future in their adoptive country.