The Other Americans
Ratings10
Average rating3.7
15
Ratings10
Average rating3.7
'A provocative and gripping novel by a gifted writer' JOHN BOYNE'Remarkable, timely ... Impeccably written' ROXANE GAY'A deftly constructed account of a crime and its consequences' J.M. COETZEE'A writer of uncommon conviction and tremendous insight' VIET THANH NGUYENThere wasn't anything I could do. All I saw was a man falling to the ground.Late one spring night, Driss Guerraoui, a Moroccan immigrant in California, is walking across a darkened intersection when he is killed by a speeding car. The repercussions of his death bring together a diverse cast of characters: Guerraoui's daughter Nora, a jazz composer who returns to the small town in the Mojave she thought she'd left for good; his widow Maryam, who still pines after her life in the old country; Efraín, an undocumented witness whose fear of deportation prevents him from coming forward; Jeremy, a former classmate of Nora's and now a veteran of the Iraq war; Coleman, a detective who is slowly discovering her son's secrets; Anderson, a neighbor trying to reconnect with his family; and Driss himself.As the characters - deeply divided by race, religion and class - tell their stories in The Other Americans, Driss's family is forced to confront its secrets, a town faces its hypocrisies and love, in all its messy and unpredictable forms, is born.
Reviews with the most likes.
Although I'm a little tired of the multi-narrator novel, I did like this book, which is really Nora's story. (I've often thought that if multiple narrators are used, there should be one voice predominating, and here we get more of Nora than anyone else, we switch often to all the rest of the novel's characters, in a way that feels a little lazy to me.) Still, it was engaging and I sympathized with most of them, although sometimes wanting to knock some sense into them.
i really enjoyed the writing style, how it shifts to each characters perspective.
