The many perspectives (there are still others) reminded me that the Pulitzer-nominated Lalami ( The Moor's Account) holds a doctorate in linguistics. Others we hear from: Jeremy Gorecki, a new cop Efraín, a Mexican immigrant without papers and Coleman, a detective a few rungs above Gorecki. When Driss dies in a hit-and-run accident, Nora wants answers, maybe even revenge, while her mother and her sister Salma have much more passive reactions - for different reasons. The first narrator in this many-voiced book is Nora Guerraoui, a young composer born and raised in California by Moroccan immigrant parents Driss and Maryam.

You're in the hands of a maestra of literary fiction, someone who has combined a riveting police procedural with a sensitive examination of contemporary life in California's Mojave Desert region. You won't want to get up from your chair for some time, maybe even until you've reached the last page. How?Ĭarve out some reading time before you pick up Laila Lalami's new novel The Other Americans. Your purchase helps support NPR programming. In so doing, Lalami’s materialist perspective is believed to debunk the Trumpist right political paranoia with reference to the assimilating capability of immigrants.Close overlay Buy Featured Book Title The Other Americans Author Laila Lalami Though no material principles of assimilation are proposed, Lalami’s implied protagonist’s eventual urges for complete integration into mainstream society draw on the power of love and forgetting rather than violence and revenge. However, the focus here is laid on her latest novel The Other Americans (2019) which features minorities from different ethnic backgrounds, yet converging in the enmeshment of their personal lives with the political forces, which intensifies the unsettled issues of identity in the US. It registers certain mobility and shifts of concerns from the tropes of homesickness, through homelessness to the rhetoric of transnationalism to grapple with white hegemonic spatiality and politics. Her fiction, four full-length novels and short prose so far, is argued to intertwine creatively with the major scholarly turns that have marked diasporic literary criticism since its inception in the early 1990s. In response to Diaspora criticism’s recommendations for listening to underground voices, often eclipsed by the leading diaspora figures, the present paper brings attention to the blossoming literary work of the contemporary Moroccan-American writer Laila Lalami.

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