Must-Read
Best Books About the Immigrant Experience
The American novel about migration has become the contemporary novel about the United States. Korean diaspora in Japan, Vietnamese diaspora in California, Ghanaian-American academic, Salvadoran nine-year-old crossing the Sonoran Desert. These eight are the books our editors recommend most when readers ask for fiction and memoir about the operational realities of migration.
8 books on this list.
Pachinkoby Min Jin Lee
5.0“Pachinko by Min Jin Lee 2017 review. Four generations of a Korean family in twentieth-century Japan, beginning with Sunja's pregnancy by a married Korean gangster in 1933 Busan. The Apple TV+ adaptation source and one of the canonical contemporary Korean-American literary novels.”
Crying in H Martby Michelle Zauner
5.0“Crying in H Mart by Michelle Zauner 2021 review. Michelle Zauner's memoir about her Korean mother's death from pancreatic cancer and the Korean food that connected them. The breakout literary commercial memoir of 2021.”
Solitoby Javier Zamora
5.0“Solito by Javier Zamora 2022 review. The 1999 migration of a nine-year-old Salvadoran boy on foot and by sea across two months. The canonical contemporary memoir of unaccompanied minor migration to the United States.”
On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeousby Ocean Vuong
5.0“On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong 2019 review. A young Vietnamese-American man writes a letter to his illiterate mother about his Hartford childhood and the OxyContin crisis that takes his first love. Vuong's debut novel.”
Free Food for Millionairesby Min Jin Lee
5.0“Free Food for Millionaires by Min Jin Lee 2007 review. A Princeton graduate and Korean-American daughter of Queens immigrants in the early-2000s New York finance world. Min Jin Lee's debut and the Pachinko predecessor.”
Homegoingby Yaa Gyasi
5.0“Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi 2016 review. Seven generations of two half-sister bloodlines, one in Ghana and one in America, from eighteenth-century Fanteland to present-day Stanford. Gyasi's debut and one of the canonical contemporary American diaspora novels.”
The Sympathizerby Viet Thanh Nguyen
5.0“The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen 2015 review. A communist double agent flees with the South Vietnamese government to Los Angeles in April 1975. Pulitzer Prize 2016 and the canonical contemporary Vietnamese-American novel.”
Transcendent Kingdomby Yaa Gyasi
5.0“Transcendent Kingdom by Yaa Gyasi 2020 review. A Stanford neuroscience graduate student runs reward-circuit experiments on mice while her Ghanaian-born mother lives in her apartment. Gyasi's second novel after Homegoing.”