Here are 100 books that The Bad Immigrant fans have personally recommended if you like
The Bad Immigrant.
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I was born in Ghana and migrated to the US, where I have spent most of my adult life. The antipathy in certain circles towards immigrants still surprises me. I have tried to address this in my own way through fiction in the hope that readers can come to see migrants as multi-dimensional people with similar hopes, dreams, and aspirations. As such, I am similarly drawn to books that address the humanity of migrants. It has always been my belief that a better understanding of those we think are different from us will help bridge our various divides. I hope my recommendations help get readers there. One book at a time.
Nadine Gordimer’s book sucked me into its post-apartheid South Africa setting.
I greatly admired how Gordimer bravely tackles the thorny matter of interracial relationships, chronicling an improbable love affair between an illegal immigrant in South Africa and a privileged white South African. Gordimer navigates the complexity of the relationship with insight and empathy, sidestepping the expediency of simplicity to deal frontally with matters of love, race, and class struggle.
When Julie Summers' car breaks down in a sleazy street, a young Arab garage mechanic comes to her rescue. Out of this meeting develops a friendship that turns to love. But soon, despite his attempts to make the most of Julie's wealthy connections, Abdu is deported from South Africa and Julie insists on going too - but the couple must marry to make the relationship legitimate in the traditional village which is to be their home. Here, whilst Abdu is dedicated to escaping back to the life he has discovered, Julie finds herself slowly drawn in by the charm of…
I was born in Ghana and migrated to the US, where I have spent most of my adult life. The antipathy in certain circles towards immigrants still surprises me. I have tried to address this in my own way through fiction in the hope that readers can come to see migrants as multi-dimensional people with similar hopes, dreams, and aspirations. As such, I am similarly drawn to books that address the humanity of migrants. It has always been my belief that a better understanding of those we think are different from us will help bridge our various divides. I hope my recommendations help get readers there. One book at a time.
I was drawn into this novel by the deftness with which Gurnah weaves together a compelling tale of love and betrayal, greed and generosity.
The chief narrator’s arrival on a shore, where he is forced to confront his past, is treated with utmost care. By confronting it with him and in a voice at once gentle and urgent, Gurnah made me see and share in the possibility and power of forgiveness and redemption.
**By the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature 2021**
LONGLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE 2002
'One scarcely dares breathe while reading it for fear of breaking the enchantment' The Times _______________
On a late November afternoon Saleh Omar arrives at Gatwick Airport from Zanzibar, a far away island in the Indian Ocean. With him he has a small bag in which lies his most precious possession - a mahogany box containing incense. He used to own a furniture shop, have a house and be a husband and father. Now he is an asylum seeker from paradise; silence his only…
I was born in Ghana and migrated to the US, where I have spent most of my adult life. The antipathy in certain circles towards immigrants still surprises me. I have tried to address this in my own way through fiction in the hope that readers can come to see migrants as multi-dimensional people with similar hopes, dreams, and aspirations. As such, I am similarly drawn to books that address the humanity of migrants. It has always been my belief that a better understanding of those we think are different from us will help bridge our various divides. I hope my recommendations help get readers there. One book at a time.
In this sprawling novel, I greatly appreciated a Uganda reeling under forces that use, abuse, and discard its victims and a nation devastated by political upheaval.
Against this backdrop, I eventually came to see the protagonist’s eventual escape from Uganda not as surrender but as a rational will to survive. Moses Isegawa’s book is so broad in scope that I greatly enjoyed the rollercoaster of seeing a vista of the major issues facing an entire continent.
Like Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Childrenand Gabriel Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude, Moses Isegawa's Abyssinian Chronicles tells a riveting story of twentieth-century Africa that is passionate in vision and breathtaking in scope.
At the center of this unforgettable tale is Mugezi, a young man who manages to make it through the hellish reign of Idi Amin and experiences firsthand the most crushing aspects of Ugandan society: he withstands his distant father's oppression and his mother's cruelty in the name of Catholic zeal, endures the ravages of war, rape, poverty, and AIDS, and yet he is able to keep a…
I was born in Ghana and migrated to the US, where I have spent most of my adult life. The antipathy in certain circles towards immigrants still surprises me. I have tried to address this in my own way through fiction in the hope that readers can come to see migrants as multi-dimensional people with similar hopes, dreams, and aspirations. As such, I am similarly drawn to books that address the humanity of migrants. It has always been my belief that a better understanding of those we think are different from us will help bridge our various divides. I hope my recommendations help get readers there. One book at a time.
Mengistu poignantly demonstrates to me the alienation that can and does haunt the migrant over time, providing deep insights into many of the things that make us human.
I found this novel highly accessible and masterly in its panoramic view of an Ethiopian immigrant’s experiences in the US. An immigrant whose life is changed in many ways but remains unchanged in others after many years in the US.
Seventeen years ago, Sepha Stephanos fled the Ethiopian Revolution for a new start in the United States. Now he finds himself running a failing grocery store in a poor African-American section of Washington, D.C., his only companions two fellow African immigrants who share his bitter nostalgia and longing for his home continent. Years ago and worlds away Sepha could never have imagined a life of such isolation. As his environment begins to change, hope comes in the form of a friendship with new neighbors Judith and Naomi, a white woman and her biracial daughter. But when a series of racial…
I grew up in Los Angeles in the 80s and 90s. I was a shy teenager, an obsessive reader, and a secret writer. I went to an all-girls high school where we wore uniforms, did a lot of homework, and mostly had no idea how to meet boys. The teen girls I encountered in movies, TV shows, and even literature were sexualized to the point of being unrecognizable to me. Now that I work with teenagers (and am a mom to one), I’m fascinated by the variability of girls this age, their wide-ranging intelligence, passions, and ways of being in the world. I love novels that reflect that complexity.
This book is the best love story I’ve read, full stop. There’s nothing like the first time you fall in love, and Ifemelu and Obinze’s relationship reminded me of that feeling—its paralyzing awkwardness and overwhelming joy.
Before I read this book, I’d never thought about what it must be like for immigrants from Africa to encounter (and enter) the long and tortured story of race in America for the first time, and the novel gave me a lot to think about on that score. I also love a novel that takes me somewhere I’ve never been, and the scenes of contemporary Lagos, where Ifemelu and Obinze are reunited, come alive in Adichie’s precise and brilliant description.
Introducing the Collins Modern Classics, a series featuring some of the most significant books of recent times, books that shed light on the human experience - classics which will endure for generations to come.
How easy it was to lie to strangers, to create with strangers the versions of our lives we imagined.
Ifemelu and Obinze are young and in love when they depart military-ruled Nigeria. Self-assured Ifemelu heads for America. But quiet, thoughtful Obinze finds post-9/11 America closed to him, and plunges into a dangerous undocumented life in London.
Fifteen years later, they reunite in a newly democratic Nigeria,…
As an immigration legal scholar and lawyer, I read about immigration a lot. From laws that seem written to confuse to articles in academic journals written for an audience of experts, I’m lucky to love what I do—and so I enjoy most of what I read. But these books are special. They drew me in and wouldn’t let go until the last page. Whether fiction or non-fiction, they are written by storytellers who bring laws and policies to life.
At times, immigration policies are so ludicrous that only fiction can tell a credible story of what’s happening.
In Luiselli’s novel, modern asylum policies in the United States get the storytelling they deserve through the lens of one New York family struggling with the ordinary challenges of life only to learn, bit by bit, just how close their lives are to the migrants attempting to navigate the extraordinary demands of immigration policies along the US-Mexican border.
NEW YORK TIMES 10 BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR • “An epic road trip [that also] captures the unruly intimacies of marriage and parenthood ... This is a novel that daylights our common humanity, and challenges us to reconcile our differences.” —The Washington Post
In Valeria Luiselli’s fiercely imaginative follow-up to the American Book Award-winning Tell Me How It Ends, an artist couple set out with their two children on a road trip from New York to Arizona in the heat of summer. As the family travels west, the bonds between them begin to fray: a fracture is growing between…
My father was transferred to Southern California from Charlotte, North Carolina when I was fourteen years old. I was excited and my friends were jealous. At that point, all I knew about California was the music of the Beach Boys and the Gidget television series. I thought everyone lived on the beach and knew movie stars. I didn’t know there were neighborhoods like Reseda and Anaheim and Fountain Valley, places where people live lives that have nothing to do with the glamour and celebrity of Hollywood. California has been my home for more than fifty years. I still find it fascinating and puzzling, and I still feel like an outsider.
Flower, Grand, First is a collection of poems about Santa Ana, California and Jalisco, Mexico. The title comes from three streets in Santa Ana, where my husband’s family has lived for more than one hundred years. Hernandez’s poems are about place and displacement and examine what it feels like to be an outsider trying to make sense of life in a strange land, always searching for home. In the wonderful poem “My Father Shows Me Catalina” Hernandez writes: “Smile so you both know it’s okay that you are different. But once-in-a-while, the division is so clean it’ll cut into you.”
Gustavo Hernandez’s debut poetry collection, Flower Grand First, moves through the complex roads of immigration, sexuality, and loss. These poems are points plotted on maps both physical and emotional—the rural landscapes of Jalisco, the glimmering plains of memory, the busy cities of California, and the circular paths of grief. Hernandez’s stunning elegies float along a timeline spanning three decades, honoring family, recording a personal history, and revealing a vulnerable but resilient voice preoccupied with time, place, and what is left behind out of necessity.
I grew up in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, a backwoods wilderness area. My parents believed in education and immersed us in the fantastic and multifarious world of books. At age ten I decided I would become a novelist. In my thirties I wrote my first novel—Mother Earth Father Sky, a tapestry of history, legends, and fantasy based on the ancient Aleut culture of Alaska. Mother Earth Father Sky, and several of its sequels, became international bestsellers. I still live in the Upper Peninsula, and I still write books that celebrate the surreptitious and exuberant ties between history and fantasy.
Juliet Grames used her grandmother’s life in early twentieth-century Italy as a foundation for this novel about two sisters—Stella and Tina. Everyday things in their Italian village erupt into life-threatening situations that Stella somehow survives until even her mother believes she must be a source of curses. Stella’s father, Antonio, continually denigrates the women in his life, but still, Stella thrives and does all she can to protect her sister. Through personal experience, I understand how misogyny can destroy a woman’s self-worth. The beauty of fantasy and Stella’s unwavering determination combine to make Grames’s novel a beacon of hope for abused women.
'You don't read this book, you live it' Erin Kelly
'Holds the reader under a spell from start to finish' O, the Oprah Magazine
'If you're going through Elena Ferrante withdrawals, this is the book for you' Harper's Bazaar
If Stella Fortuna means 'lucky star,' then life must have a funny sense of humour.
Everybody in the Fortuna family knows the story of how the beautiful, fiercely independent Stella, who refused to learn to cook and who swore she would never marry, has escaped death time and time again.
From her childhood in Italy, to her adulthood in America, death…
I’m a language scientist and a writer, but most of all, a person who is smitten with language in all its forms. No doubt my fascination was shaped by my early itinerant life as a child immigrant between Czechoslovakia to Canada, with exposure to numerous languages along the way. I earned a PhD in linguistics and taught linguistics and psychology at Brown University and later, the University of Calgary, but I now spend most of my time writing for non-academic readers, integrating my scientific understanding of language with a love for its aesthetic possibilities.
This is one of the most innovative and intriguing memoirs I have read. Its structure is inspired by the visual image of the line that runs through the Punjab region, partitioning Pakistan from India. The book is separated into halves: one half relates the stories of the author’s parents, who were born on opposite sides of the line, and the other presents the author’s own experiences and observations as a second-generation immigrant. Nothing about the design of the book indicates which half should be read first—a hint that the reader will be invited to consider the resonances running in both directions across the generations.
The theme of fragmentation and division is, paradoxically, the glue that binds the various elements of the book together. The author explores the arbitrary lines, imposed by historical and cultural forces, that divide people from each other and that split their selves into parts. The portrait…
WINNER OF THE 2020 GOVERNOR GENERAL'S LITERARY AWARD FOR NONFICTION
“Wondrously and elegantly written in language that astonishes and moves the reader…This is an important book: an emotional and intellectual tour de force.” —Jane Urquhart
An experimental memoir about Partition, immigration, and generational storytelling, This Red Line Goes Straight to Your Heart weaves together the poetry of memory with the science of embodied trauma, using the imagined voices of the past and the vital authority of the present.
We begin with a man off balance: one in one thousand, the only child in town whose polio leads to partial paralysis.…
I write about family, inspired by the exquisitely flawed one I dwell within. Loving my children is the easiest and hardest thing I have ever done in that it was easy to fall in love with them the moment they came into this world but the accountability to that love can be staggering. The same can be said for my siblings. I hope my novels and stories help readers examine the ways we are all tethered to one another. My writing is where I try to untangle all of that. It’s about the ties that bind and how we choose to wear those bindings, especially in times of crisis.
Siblings tend to circle the wagon around one another. Sure, we squabble amongst ourselves, but when the outside world comes at one of us, it might as well have come for all of us. At least that’s been my experience. But honestly, this constant rescuing can be tiresome and perhaps it asks too much of us—especially if we’re dealing with our own unresolved heartache. This novel is so honest in its portrayal of three sisters, frantic to save a sister and finally forced to share in the grief and blame. I also loved that the main character, a former college professor, turns to literature to help her find her moral way.
A Time Magazine Must-Read Book of 2020 A Most-Anticipated Book of the Year: O, The Oprah Magazine * The New York Times * The Washington Post *Vogue * Bustle * BuzzFeed * Ms. magazine * The Millions * Huffington Post * PopSugar * The Lily * Goodreads * Library Journal * LitHub * Electric Literature
The first adult novel in almost fifteen years by the internationally bestselling author of In the Time of the Butterflies and How the García Girls Lost Their Accents
“A stunning work of art that reminds readers Alvarez is, and always has been, in a class…
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