AFGHANI

• Ansary, Tamim. West of Kabul, East of New York: An Afghan American Story. Ansary, who was raised in Afghanistan, the son of an exemplar of that nation's civil elite and of an American his father met while studying abroad, moved to the United States in time to live out college and urban cool in the Sixties and Seventies. But this Afghan American, writing in response to 9/11 and in fact extending to book-length some of the notions he posited in a widely read e-mail on September 12, 2001, tells truths about dislocation, heritage, home, family, and religion that both affirm life and profoundly sadden. Ansary's account of how his brother chose to stay "east of New York," of his travels through Muslim communities at the time of the Iranian hostage crisis, and of his personal collision with conspiracy theory are particularly unsettling and worth any reader's time.  
• Stine, Catherine. Refugees. Dawn is a runaway from California headed for New York City. Johar, 15, is from Afghanistan, buts flees to a refugee camp near Pakistan where Dawn's foster mother is a Red Cross doctor. After September 11, their lives take a different path that leads them to develop an email friendship that forms a bond and helps them discover their own strengths.

• Abu-Japer, Diana. Crescent: a novel.  Multidimensional love story set in the Arab-American community of Los Angeles.
• Abu-Japer, Diana. Arabian Jazz.  Jordanian immigrant Matussem Ramoud and his two daughters live in a poor, mostly white town in upstate New York, where "ethnics" are few and far between, in this story about the individual search for self and for home.  
• Hanania, Ray. I'm Glad I Look Like a Terrorist: Growing Up Arab in America. Arab American activist, speaker on issues of racial profiling, discrimination and ethnicity.

BANGALEDESHI

• Budhos, Marina. Ask Me No Questions. Fourteen-year-old Nadira, her sister, and their parents leave Bangladesh for New York City, but the expiration of their visas and the events of September 11, 2001, bring frustration, sorrow, and terror for the whole family.

BULGARIAN

• Yankoff, Peter D. Peter Menikoff. Autobiography of Dr. Peter Yankoff, who emigrated from Bulgaria to the United States in the early 20th century.

• Ho, Mingfo. Stone Goddess.  When Sophy and her older siblings are ripped away from their family by the cruel Khmer Rouge and sent to work in a children's labor camp, Sophy bears witness to innumerable tragedies, paying too dear a price. After the Vietnamese army liberates Cambodia, Sophy returns to her mother's village, where they decide to seek refuge in America. Upon arriving in America, Sophy struggles to adjust to life in a completely new and different society, but she is caught up in the memories of all that she left behind.
• Sutter, Valerie O'Connor. The Indo-Chinese Refugee Dilemma. Sutter opens this study by comparing the American responses to the 1956 exodus from Hungary and to the post-1975 flight from Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. The Indochinese refugee issue is viewed from the perspectives of several countries that provided temporary asylum (Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, the Philippines, Hong Kong) and that of the U.S. as a major donor and resettlement country. While examining related humanitarian concerns, Sutter gives special attention to the performance of the United Nations High Commission for Refugees, the leading coordinating agency mandated to protect and assist refugees. The light here shed on the complexity of the issue worldwide (some 14 million refugees are currently in need of assistance) leaves the impression that escaping persecution is less difficult than finding permanent asylum.  
  
  

CHINESE

• Chang, Lan Samantha. Inheritance. A complicated sister bond echoes through generations in this novel. In China in the early 1930s, sisters Junan and Yinan are inseparable, even as Junan matures into beauty and Yinan remains awkward and plain. Junan enters into an arranged marriage and falls in love with Li Ang, her soldier husband. Separated from him when the Japanese invade China, Junan sends the unmarried Yinan to keep her husband's household. What is intended as an arrangement of convenience turns to betrayal when Li Ang and Yinan have an affair. As China is divided by communism, the family is also rent in two. Junan and her daughters Hong (who is also the narrator) and Hwa end up in the States, while Yinan and Li Ang remain in mainland China with their son and are effectively banished from memory.  
• Chin, Frank. Gunga Din Highway.  Follows two generations of the Kwan family, weaving mythology and humor into the lives of a Chinese American family and their life in Hollywood's movie business.
• Chin, Frank. Donald Duk.  On the eve of the Chinese New Year in San Francisco's Chinatown, twelve-year-old Donald Duk attempts to deal with his comical name and his feelings for his cultural heritage.
• Jen, Gish. Typical American. Ralph, Theresa, and Helen all move from China to America to escape political turbulence. But once in America they find their lives, their morals, their beliefs and dreams changing.  
• Jen, Gish. Mona in the Promised Land. In 1968, teenager Mona Chang and her family discover a confusing new world filled with ethnic complexities when they move to exclusive Scarshill, New York.
• Jin, Ha. A Free Life. In this novel, Nan Wu, a Chinese graduate student in Boston, drops out after the Tiananmen Square massacre. He would like to abandon his marriage, too, but his sense of duty toward Pingping and their young son is stronger than his desire for passion and the freedom to write poetry. Emotionally powerful and tender, Ha Jin's tale of one immigrant family's odyssey in America affirms humankind's essential mission, to honor life.  
• Kingston, Maxine Hong. Woman Warrior. Maxine Hong Kingston grew up to two worlds. There was "solid America," the place her parents emigrated to, and the China of her mother's "talk-stories." In talk-stories women were warriors and her mother was still a doctor in China who could cure the sick and scare away ghosts, not a harried and frustrated woman running a stifling laundromat in California. But what is story and what is truth? In China, a ghost is a supernatural being; in America it is anyone who is not Chinese. In addition, underlying even the most exciting talk-stories of Chinese women warriors is the real oppression of Chinese women: "There is a Chinese word for the female 'I' - which is 'slave.' " In an attempt to figure out her world, Maxine Hong Kingston finds herself creating stories of her own, filling in the blanks her mother has not told her because her daughter is, after all, not true Chinese and thus cannot be completely trusted. Can these new stories explain why she had trouble speaking in the American schools? Can they help her understand the aunt who committed adultery and whose existence is denied? The new stories refuse to fall into traditional forms, and the realizations that come from them often bring out a beautiful, passionate anger that practically burns through the pages. This is powerful, experimental writing, a combination of love, hate, frustration, and sheer beauty.
• Lee, Gus. China Boy. In the 1950s, Kai Ting and his family come to San Francisco, but his mother dies shortly thereafter, and his new stepmother wants to erase everything Chinese from his life.
• Namioka, Lensey. Mismatch. Their families clash when a Japanese-American teenaged boy starts dating a Chinese-American teenaged girl.  
• Yep, Laurence. Mountain Light. Swept up in one of the local rebellions against the Manchus in China, nineteen-year-old Squeaky loses his home and travels to America to seek his fortune among the gold fields of California.
• Raban, Jonathan. Waxwings. A novel set in Seattle at the turn of the millennium follows two immigrants as they struggle to achieve the American dream in the midst of terrorism, economic fireworks, and unrest in the streets.
• See, Lisa. On Gold Mountain. Out of the stories heard in her childhood in Los Angeles's Chinatown and years of research, See has constructed this sweeping chronicle of her Chinese-American family, a work that takes in stories of racism and romance, entrepreneurial genius and domestic heartache, secret marriages and sibling rivalries, in a powerful history of two cultures meeting in a new world.
• Tan, Amy. The Joy Luck Club. Four Chinese women formed the club in San Francisco; now the American-born daughter of one learns about her mother's deepest wish.  
• Wong, Joyce Lee. Seeing Emily. Relates in free verse the experiences of sixteen-year-old Emily, a gifted artist and the daughter of immigrants to the United States, as she tries to reconcile her American self with her Chinese heritage.  
• Yep, Laurence. The Journal of Wong Ming-Chung.  In 1852, during the height of the California Gold Rush, ten-year-old Wong Ming-Chung makes the dangerous trip to America to join his uncle on his hunt for a fortune. The true treasure for Ming-Chung, though, is America itself.
• Yep, Laurence. The Traitor. This novel, based on a true event, tells the story of two young teens who live in Rock Springs, WY, in 1885 when animosity between American and Chinese miners reaches its peak. Born in the U.S. to Chinese parents who emigrated from Kwangtung, Joseph Young considers himself an American, but both communities see him as only Chinese. Michael Purdy is an "outsider" because of his illegitimate birth. The boys meet when Michael escapes hounding by bullies and hides in a cave outside of town where Joseph is fossil hunting. In chapters that alternate between the two boys, the book describes their growing friendship despite the escalating trouble between the Chinese and the "Westerners" who blame the newcomers for their economic hardships and march on Chinatown in a rampage. Author Yep does a good job portraying the rampant prejudice, and he does not sugarcoat the horrifying violence, told from Michael's point of view. In stark contrast to the inhumanity he sees in the streets, his mother acts humanely in spite of her negative view of the Chinese.
  

• Cather, Willa. My Antonia. Czech immigrant Antonia Shimerda comes to the Nebraska plains and works as a servant for her neighbors after her father's death. She elopes and then returns to marry a Bohemian farmer.

COLOMBIAN

• Franco, Jorge. Paradise Travel. Marlon Cruz, a naive young man from Medellin, Columbia, accompanies the woman he loves to New York, where he loses his way and finds himself alone in an unfamiliar world.

CUBAN

• Bernardo, Anilu. Fitting In: A Novel. This collection of stories offers moving portraits of strong girls who rise to the challenges of bicultural adolescence and who come to terms with their cultural identity.  
• Eire, Carlos. Waiting for Snow in Havana: Confessions of a Cuban Boy. Noted religion scholar Carlos Eire's idyllic and privileged childhood in Havana came to an end in the wake of Castro's revolution. In this memoir, he reveals an exotic, magical Cuba and an eccentric family: his father - a municipal judge and art collector - believed that in a past life he had been King Louis XVI. In 1962, Carlos Eire's world changed forever when he and his brother were among the 14,000 children airlifted off the island, their parents left behind. In chronicling his life before and after his arrival in America, Mr. Eire's personal story is also a meditation on loss and suffering, redemption and rebirth.  
• García, Cristina. The Agüero Sisters: A Novel. The acclaimed new novel by the author of "Dreaming in Cuban". Told in the stirring voices of their parents, their daughters, and themselves, "The Aguero Sisters" weaves a mesmerizing story about the power of myth to unmask, transform, and finally reveal the truth--as two women move toward an uncertain, long-awaited reunion.  
• Garcia, Christina. A Handook to Luck. Birds grace the pages of Garcia's most transfixing and moving novel to date, emblems of transcendence and hope in defiance of the gravity of fate. As in her earlier novels, including Monkey Hunting (2003), Garcia writes from several points of view as she tells unpredictably linked stories of people in flight from oppression during the 1970s and 1980s. Young Enrique Florit accompanies his exuberantly flamboyant and talented Cuban magician father, Fernando, as he flees Castro and the wrath of his late wife's family, seeking fame and fortune in Hollywood and Las Vegas. As war ravages El Salvador, Marta Claros, whose brother lives in a tree, leaves her abusive husband and bravely makes her way to California, where she finds sanctuary with a kind Korean factory owner. Leila Rezvani allows herself a brief interlude of pleasure in Las Vegas before returning to Tehran and a disastrous arranged marriage. Garcia's vital characters cope with exile, violence, and crushed dreams as they struggle toward love and freedom. As Garcia constructs concentric worlds of conflict and longing, discerns cultural paradoxes and human contrariness, and writes rhapsodically of nature's beauty, life emerges as a cosmic game of chance under luck's misrule. (From Booklist)
• Hijuelos, Oscar. The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love. Cuban musicians become the toast of New York night life.  
• Ojito, Mirta. Finding Mañana: A Memoir of a Cuban Exodus. Mirta Ojito chronicles her family's immigration from Castro's Cuba to the United States in the 1980 Mariel Boatlift, describing how the journey impacted her own life and her impressions of the United States.
• Samartin, Cecilia. Broken Paradise. Cousins Nora and Alicia, raised among Havana's privileged class, face difficult challenges in 1956 when Castro takes over the country. This prompts Nora to move to the United States where she struggles to fit in, and leaves Alicia to try to adapt to food shortages, disease, the outlawing of religion, and other harsh realities of changed life in Cuba.
• Triana, Gaby. Cubanita. Seventeen-year-old Isabel, eager to leave Miami to attend the University of Michigan and escape her overprotective Cuban mother, learns some truths about her family's past and makes important decisions about the type of person she wants to be.  
• Veciana-Suarez, Ana. Flight to Freedom.  Writing in the diary which her father gave her, thirteen-year-old Yara describes life with her family in Havana, Cuba, in 1967 as well as her experiences in Miami, Florida, after immigrating there to be reunited with some relatives while leaving others behind. 

DOMINICAN

• Alvarez, Julia. How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accent.  It's a long way from Santo Domingo to the Bronx, but if anyone can go the distance, it's the Garcia girls. Four lively latinas plunged from a pampered life of privilege on an island compound into the big-city chaos of New York rebel against Mami and Papi's old-world discipline.  
• Alvarez, Julia. Yo! A Novel. (Sequel to How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accent) The center of many lives, thrice-married writer Yolanda Garcia celebrates her fame while entangling others in her web, in a story that is told from the viewpoints of the confused people whose lives she touches.  
• Diaz, Junot. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. Things have never been easy for Oscar, a seriously overweight first-generation Dominican-American, living in New Jersey. He's a likeable nerd who dreams of becoming the next J.R.R. Tolkien, and of falling in love himself.  
• Perez, Loida Maritza. Geographies of Home. Dominican family with fourteen children tries to succeed in the United States. The central character is Iliana who attends college. In college, a Hispanic is out of place, but Iliana feels even more out of place when she returns home to Brooklyn. A brother is having an adulterous affair with the wife of another brother, a sister lives with chickens, while another has visions of demons.  

EAST INDIAN

• Lahiri, Jhumpa. The Namesake. A young man born of Indian parents in America struggles with issues of identity from his teens to his thirties. Told with beautiful details, Gogol's story is neither comedy nor tragedy; it's simply that ordinary, hard-to-get-down-on-paper commodity: real life.  
• Pradhan, Monica. The Hindi-Bindi Club. As youngsters, first generation Americans Kiran, Preity, and Rani often scoffed at their mothers, who they dubbed the Hindi-Bindi Club, but as adults they come to realize there may be some value in the "old country" ways. Includes recipes. Like Amy Tan's Joy Luck Club, Pradhan's first novel, which features six alternating narrators, speaks to the cultural and generational tensions between immigrant mothers and their Westernized daughters.  
• Reddi, Rishi. Karma and Other Stories. Set primarily in Boston and its suburbs, Reddi's debut focuses on individuals and families struggling to reconcile their East Indian backgrounds with American life, while attempting to preserve their ethnic communities.

ETHIOPIAN

• Mengestu, Dinaw. The Beautiful Things that Heaven Bears. In his run-down store in a gentrifying neighborhood of Washington, D.C., Ethiopian immigrant Stepha Stephanos regularly meets with fellow African immigrants Ken the Kenyan and Joe from the Congo. Their favorite game is matching African nations to coups and dictators, as they consider how their new immigrant expectations measure up to the reality of life in America after 17 years. From his store and nearby apartment, Stephanos makes keen observations of American race and class tensions, seeing similarities--physical and social--to his hometown of Addis Ababa, where his father was killed in the throes of revolution. When Judith, a white woman, and Naomi, her mixed-race daughter, move into the neighborhood, Stephanos finds tentative prospects for friendship beyond his African compatriots. He encounters some disapproval of his new relationship, as well as tensions about the wave of gentrification in the neighborhood. Mengestu, himself an Ethiopian immigrant, engages the reader in a deftly drawn portrait of dreams in the face of harsh realities from the perspective of immigrants. (from Booklist)

FILIPINO

• Brainard, Cecilia, ed. Growing Up Filipino. This book includes 29 short stories about Filipino youths. Some of the authors still live in the Philippines, have immigrated to the U.S., or are Filipino-American born. Tough but relevant topics are addressed.  
• De La Cruz, Melissa. Fresh Off the Boat. When her family emigrates from the Philippines to San Francisco, California, fourteen-year-old Vicenza Arambullo struggles to fit in at her exclusive, all-girl private school.  
• Emburg, Kate. The Language of Love. To Miguel Sarmiento, Leanne is a traditional Filipino girl. But in reality, exotic Leanna has grown up with her mom and stepdad in a household that's as American as apple pie. Now as things heat up between them, Leanne wonders how long she can keep up her act. Can a love based on lies ever survive?
• Hagedorn, Jessica Tarahata. The Gangster of Love. This tells the story of Rocky Rivera, who has emigrated from the Philippines to the United States along with her mother and her emotionally disturbed brother, Voltaire. Rocky has a hippyish adolescence in 1970s San Francisco, then moves to New York City with her boyfriend, Elvis Chang, and her best friend, a photographer named Keiko.
• Roley, Brian Ascalon. American Son: A Novel. American Son is the story of two Filipino brothers adrift in contemporary California. The older brother, Tomas, fashions himself into a Mexican gangster and breeds pricey attack dogs, which he trains in German and sells to Hollywood celebrities. The narrator is younger brother Gabe, who tries to avoid the tar pit of Tomas's waywardness, yet moves ever closer to embracing it. Their mother, who moved to America to escape the caste system of Manila and is now divorced from their American father, struggles to keep her sons in line while working two dead-end jobs.
• Romero, Sophia G. Always Hiding: A Novel. "My birth should have been an auspicious occasion for my parents because I was their first child. But I was born a girl and in the Philippines that made all the difference," writes Maria Violetta Rosario Dananay, the narrator of this story. Her life was at first a happy one, beloved by both father and mother. But when her father eloped with his latest flame, who was pregnant by him, the world turned sour. Her mother, unable to face the disgrace, fled to New York and became an illegal alien. Virtually deserted by her father, she lived as dangerously as she could until her father, who was in serious political trouble, sent her to her mother in New York. There she encountered an entirely new set of problems and courageously set out to conquer them. Always Hiding is a new and fascinating view of modern Filipino life.
• Santos, Bienvenido N. Scent of Apples: A Collection of Stories.
• Santos, Bienvenido N. What the Hell for You Left Your Heart in San Francisco: A Novel.

FINNISH

• Durbin, William. Song of Sampo Lake. In 1900, as a family of Finnish immigrants begins farming on the edge of a Minnesota lake, Matti works as a store clerk, teaches English, and works on the homestead, striving to get out of his older brother's shadow and earn their father's respect.
• Yep, Laurence. The Journal of Otto Peltonen. In 1905 fifteen-year-old Otto describes in his journal how he travels from Finland to America, joining his father in a dreary iron mining community in Minnesota and becoming involved in a union fight for better working conditions.

GERMAN

• Erdrich, Louise. The Master Butcher’s Singing Club.  With a suitcase full of sausages and a master butcher's precious set of knives, Fidelis sets out for America, getting as far as North Dakota, where he builds a business, a home for his family -- which includes Eva and four sons -- and a singing club consisting of the best voices in town.

• Franke, Richard J. Cut from Whole Cloth: An Immigrant Experience. Accomplished businessman Richard J. Franke offers an intimate account of the American immigrant experience, recounting the moving story of his grandparents' struggle to build a new life in turn-of-the-century America. Franke draws on extensive primary sources to create an engrossing narrative of his Catholic grandfather and Lutheran grandmother as they flee religious intolerance and economic adversity in Germany and immigrate to America in 1884. They settle in Springfield, Illinois, where they start a family and business and live out the American dream — with its attendant perils and promises — as their business evolves from a tailor's shop to a modern, thriving dry cleaner. Their story is one of strife, frustration, and success. Franke chronicles how they struggle to raise a family in a foreign culture with radically different values, as the old world morals that fuel their prosperity give rise to ancient family tensions that haunt each new generation. By turns charming, wrenching, and poetic, Cut from Whole Cloth is an intensely personal yet timeless tale that will appeal to nearly every descendant of immigrants.

• Gaffney, Elizabeth. Metropolis.  This novel tells the story of Frank Harris, a young German immigrant, who is drawn into the criminal underworld of New York in the 1870s.

• Hegi, Ursula. The Vision of Emma Blau. An epic story of German immigrants attempting to assimilate while still preserving traces of home in their language and rituals. In 1894 Stefan Blau leaves Europe for America; he is only 13 years old, but he feels the need for another country so strongly that it wakes him up at night. After narrowly escaping a restaurant fire in New York City, he finds himself in New Hampshire. With money he has saved from waiter jobs and poker winnings, he buys a small hotel, which over time he transforms into a six-story, elaborate apartment house.

• Levitin, Sonia. Silver days. Escaping from Hitler's Germany, a prosperous Jewish family lives in a New York City tenement until Papa decides to move the family to California.

• Sharratt, Mary. Summit Avenue. Orphaned by the age of 16, German native Kathrin Albrecht is sent to America in 1912, where she barely ekes out a living sewing flour bags for the Pillsbury Mill in Minneapolis, but finds sanctuary and friendship in an antique bookstore.
  

GREEK

• Douros, Basil. Carved in Stone. Novel taking place both in Boston and in rural Greece, describing the culture and traditions that the Greek men and women brought with them when they emigrated to America in the early 1900's.

• Eugenides, Jeffrey. Middlesex. Story of three generations of a Greek-American family who travel from a tiny village overlooking Mount Olympus in Asia Minor to Prohibition-era Detroit, witnessing its glory days as the Motor City, and the race riots of l967, before they move out to the tree-lined streets of suburban Grosse Pointe, Michigan.

• George, Harry S. Demo of 70th Street. New York in the early 1900's is an exciting place with a mixture of cultures for young Demosthenes, a Greek immigrant boy.

• Janus, Christopher. Miss 4th of July, Goodbye. A family emigrates from Greece to Montgomery, W. Va. in 1917, and is disillusioned by the prejudice and violence of the Ku Klux Klan.

• Karanikas, Alexander. Hellenes and Hellions: Modern Greek Characters in American Literature. Bibliography, overview, criticism, and interpretation.

• Lambros, Nickos. Odysseus. An illegal immigrant chases the "American Dream" and achieves it at the expense of his heritage and perhaps his soul.

• Papandreou, Nicholas. A Crowded Heart. The story of a young man from California whose family returns to Greece, where his father pursues a career in politics. The real subject here is the love-hate relationship of the little American boy transplanted to a culture he doesn't know and is unwilling to accept.

• Papanikolas, Helen. A Greek Odyssey in the American West.  This book begins with the author's childhood in Helper, Utah, a way station for the Denver and Rio Grande Western Railroad. Helper's population was as odd a conglomeration as could be found anywhere in the West : French sheepherders; Chinese and Japanese restaurant owners; African American, Greek, and Italian rail and coal workers; and Mormon, Jewish, and Slav businessmen. This is not, however, Papanikolas's life story, but rather the tale of her parents' individual emigrations to the U.S., their meeting and courtship, and their migrations within the West as they pursued job opportunities. Papanikolas re-creates and interprets the experience of parents who try hard to succeed in America without losing their rich heritage and who ultimately enrich the culture of their adopted country.

• Papanikolas, Helen. The Time of the Little Black Bird. This novel tells the story of generations of Greek Americans, with its story of loyalty, betrayal, tradition and greed. Centering on a family business that grows from a few shabby storefronts and a run-down hotel near the Salt Lake City railroad yards, the story finds the Kallos family weathering the Depression and the war years to become rich. Beset, though, by awkward attempts to assimilate and by testing the family's values, the family solidarity unravels and the business treachery that has been developing for three generations is uncovered.  

• Papanikolas, Helen. The Apple Falls from the Apple Tree and Small Bird, Tell Me. Two Collections of SHORT STORIES about Greek Americans.

GUATEMALAN

• Welter John. I Want to Buy a Vowel.  Eva Galt, a young minister's child, begins asking hard questions about God and her parents' divorce, while illegal immigrant Alfredo Santayana questions the American dream, and when their paths cross, the result is a satire on small-town media culture run amok.

HAITIAN

• Danticat, Edwidge. Behind the Mountains.  Writing in the notebook which her teacher gave her, thirteen-year-old Celiane describes life with her mother and brother in Haiti as well as her experiences in Brooklyn after the family finally immigrates there to be reunited with her father.  
• Danticat, Edwidge. Breath, Eyes, Memory: A Novel. At the age of 12, Sophie Caco is sent from her impoverished Haitian village to New York, to be reunited with a mother she barely remembers. There she discovers secrets that no child should ever know, and a legacy of shame that can be healed only when she returns to Haiti - to the woman who first reared her. What ensues is a passionate journey through a landscape charged with the supernatural and scarred by political violence, in a novel that bears witness to the traditions, suffering, and wisdom of an entire people.  
• Danticat, Edwidge. The Dew Breaker. A series of related stories around a shadowy central figure, a Haitian immigrant to the U.S. who reveals to his artist daughter that he is not, as she believes, a prison escapee, but a former prison guard, skilled in torture and the other violent control methods of a brutal regime.  
• Danticat, Edwidge, ed. The Butterfly's Way: Voices from the Haitian Dyaspora in the United States.  
• Placide, Jaira. Fresh girl.  After having been sent, at a very young age, from New York to live with her grandmother in Haiti, fourteen-year-old Mardi returns to join her parents and try to shape a new life in Brooklyn.  

HMONG

• Shea, Pegi. Tangled Threads — A Hmong Girl's Story: A Novel.  After ten years in a refugee camp in Thailand, thirteen-year-old Mai Yang travels to Providence, Rhode Island, where her Americanized cousins introduce her to pizza, shopping, and beer, while her grandmother and new friends keep her connected to her Hmong heritage.

INDIAN

• Chandra, G. S. Sharat. Sari of the Gods. A collection of stories describes the challenges faced by Indian Americans as they try to adapt to a new culture while preserving their heritage.   
• Desai, Anita. Fasting, Feasting.  As Uma, the unmarriageable adult daughter of an Indian lawyer, copes with her parents' demands and traditional Indian family life, her younger brother, Arun, must face a vastly different life living with an American family in a Massachusetts suburb.  
• Divakaruni, Chitra Banerjee. The Mistress of Spices. Tilo, a young woman born in a faraway place and time, must choose between the supernatural life of an immortal and the hardships of life on Earth when she travels through time to modern-day California and falls in love with a mortal man.  
• Divakaruni, Chitra Banerjee. Queen of Dreams. Rakhi, a young artist living in Berkeley, California, finds herself caught between the turmoil of life in America in the wake of September 11th and the India of her mother, a woman with the ability to share and interpret the dreams of others.
• Divakaruni, Chitra Banerjee. The Unknown Errors of Our Lives.  A collection of short stories set in India explores the adjustment of immigrants to a foreign land, the accommodations families make to the differences between generations, and the struggle to find a balance between the pull of home and the promise of change.   
• Hidier, Tanuja Desai. Born Confused. Seventeen-year-old Dimple, whose family is from India, discovers that she is not Indian enough for the Indians and not American enough for the Americans, as she sees her hypnotically beautiful, manipulative best friend taking possession of both her heritage and the boy she likes.
• Lahiri, Jhumpa. The Namesake. A portrait of the immigrant experience follows the Ganguli family from their traditional life in India through their arrival in Massachusetts in the late 1960s and their difficult melding into an American way of life.   
• Nigam, Sanjay. Transplanted Man. Serving a community of eccentric expatriates from India, rebellious medical resident Sonny Seth faces personal demons while being drawn into the world of one of his patients, a high-level Indian government official who is being hunted by assassins.
• Mukherjee, Bharati. Jasmine. In her passage from India, Jyote becomes Jasmine then Jane. She lives in Manhattan, Florida, and finally ends up as a farm wife in Iowa. The author forces the reader to see America with new eyes in this well-written novel of transformation.   
• Vijayaraghavan, Vineeta. Motherland. Fifteen-year-old Maya learns the cause of the rift she feels between her and her mother and is finally able to come to terms with her divided loyalties when she leaves New York to spend the summer with her grandmother in southern India, the land of her birth.

IRANIAN

• Dubus, Andre, III. House of Sand and Fog. Three fragile yet determined people are drawn by their competing desires to the same small house in the California hills and become dangerously entangled in a relentlessly escalating crisis.
• Garcia, Christina. A Handook to Luck. Birds grace the pages of Garcia's most transfixing and moving novel to date, emblems of transcendence and hope in defiance of the gravity of fate. As in her earlier novels, including Monkey Hunting (2003), Garcia writes from several points of view as she tells unpredictably linked stories of people in flight from oppression during the 1970s and 1980s. Young Enrique Florit accompanies his exuberantly flamboyant and talented Cuban magician father, Fernando, as he flees Castro and the wrath of his late wife's family, seeking fame and fortune in Hollywood and Las Vegas. As war ravages El Salvador, Marta Claros, whose brother lives in a tree, leaves her abusive husband and bravely makes her way to California, where she finds sanctuary with a kind Korean factory owner. Leila Rezvani allows herself a brief interlude of pleasure in Las Vegas before returning to Tehran and a disastrous arranged marriage. Garcia's vital characters cope with exile, violence, and crushed dreams as they struggle toward love and freedom. As Garcia constructs concentric worlds of conflict and longing, discerns cultural paradoxes and human contrariness, and writes rhapsodically of nature's beauty, life emerges as a cosmic game of chance under luck's misrule. (From Booklist)
• Latifi, Afschineh. Even After All This Time: a Story of Love, Revolution, and Leaving Iran. This poignant memoir chronicles one family's odyssey through the Iranian Revolution and beyond. The daughter of a colonel in the shah's army and a schoolteacher, Latifi and her siblings lived a comfortable life in Tehran in the 1970s until Khomeini catapulted into power. When her father was arrested and executed like so many of his contemporaries, her family was immediately plunged into confusion and disarray. Sent with her sister to school in Austria, young Latifi did not reunite with the rest of her family until many years later. Finally together again in the U.S., the Latifi clan successfully struggled to rebuild its collective future together. Culminating in a bittersweet return trip to Iran, Latifi's tribute to her family's courage and resilience is a compelling testament to the dauntless nature of the human spirit in the face of all types of repression and adversity.
• Moaveni, Azadeh. Lipstick Jihad: A Memoir of Growing Up Iranian in America and American in Iran. Author Azadeh Moaveni examines her life as an American-born Iranian and the frustration and confusion of trying to live in both world. She describes her decision to move to Tehran as a journalist and the cultural, political, and social upheaval she encountered.
• Tyler, Anne. Digging to America. A chance encounter between two families--the Donaldsons, and the Iranian-born Yasdans--at the Baltimore airport prompts an examination about what it means to be an American. Bitsy and Brad Donaldson are the quintessential middle-class, white American couple. Sami and Ziba Yazdan are Iranian Americans. From the beginning, the differences in the ways they will raise their daughters are obvious: Bitsy's well-meaning but overzealous efforts to retain her child's Korean heritage are evident in the chosen name–Jin-Ho–and in the Korean costumes that she dresses the girl in every year as they mark the anniversary of the adoption date. The Yazdans are comfortable with their daughter Susan's assimilation into their own Iranian-American culture. When Bitsy's widowed father begins to show romantic interest in Susan's grandmother, cultural differences are brought to a head.  
  

IRISH

• Auch, Mary Jane. Ashes of Roses. Sixteen-year-old Margaret Rose Nolan, newly arrived from Ireland, finds work at New York City's Triangle Shirtwaist Factory shortly before the 1911 fire in which 146 employees died.  
• Baker, Kevin. Paradise Alley. A story set against the draft riots of 1863, at the height of the Civil War, when Irish mobs terrorized New York City.   
• Carroll, James. Mortal Friends. A multigenerational saga of Irish-Americans immigrants in Boston. Setting ranges from the Irish Rebellion of the early 1920s to the Boston of Mayor Curley and the Kennedys in the 1940s and 1950s.  
• Ceely, Jonatha. Bread and Dreams. Pursuing her dreams of building a new life for herself, Mina heads for America in 1848 to seek her fortune in the bustling, challenging, and treacherous city of New York and to locate her beloved long-lost brother, struggling all the while with her growing feelings for her companion and friend, Mr. Serle.  
• Conlon-McKenna, Marita. Wildflower Girl.  In the mid-nineteenth century, thirteen-year-old Peggy O'Driscoll sets out alone from Ireland for America, hoping to make a better life for herself.
• Holland, Isabelle. Paper Boy. This story, set in New York City in 1881, tells the story of the prejudice against the Irish poor. .
• MacDonald, Michael Patrick. All Souls. Irish American Michael Patrick MacDonald describes how his family survived the daily violence they encountered while living in South Boston (Southie).
• MacDonald, Michael Patrick. Easter Rising. Author Michael Patrick MacDonald reflects on his childhood in South Boston, how he was different from his four siblings who died there, his move to New York, travels to Ireland, death of his father, and  more.
• McDermott, Alice. At Weddings and Wakes.  Children in an Irish-American family in the 1960s tell about their activities and the stories of Irish immigrants they have heard.   
• Moore, Ann. "Til Morning Light. Having left Ireland with her young children to accept a marriage proposal from a sea captain in San Francisco, Gracelin O'Malley finds herself forced to accept a job with a prominent doctor and caught up in blackmail and betrayal.  
• Nixon, Joan Lowry. Land of Promise.  Arriving in Chicago from her family farm in Ireland, fifteen-year-old Rose Carney must work to help pay for her mother's and sisters' passages to America, while struggling with her father's drinking, her brothers' political activities, and her own dreams.
• Temple, Lou Jane. The Spice Box. In 1855, immigrant Bridget Heaney escaped from Ireland's Great Famine to New York City, where she spent her childhood as a pickpocket, supporting herself and her younger sister. But ever since she made her first pot of soup at the orphanage, she knew she wanted to be a cook. Now, in the home of wealthy and powerful department store owner Isaac Gold, her dream is about to come true. But with that dream comes a murder mystery she has to solve.
  

ITALIAN

• Ardizzone, Tony. In the Garden of Papa Santuzzu.  A detailed chronicle of the slow and steady emigration of a close Sicilian family to America in the early 1900s captures the individual stories of family members as they escape their past for a better future.
• Bernardi, Adria. In the Gathering Woods. Presents fourteen short stories, all with narrators from the same Italian family, from sixteenth-century Italy to twentieth-century Chicago.  This focus on Italian families consistently highlights the way each generation attempts to pass to the next the knowledge it considers vital. (Note - author grew up in Highwood/Highland Park area and presented at FOCUS on the Arts 2007)
• Bernardi, Adria. Openwork. Bernardi follows Imola's family and countrymen as they settle in America, creating an expansive yet intimate multigenerational tale that reaches from the rugged hillsides of Tuscany during the waning days of the nineteenth century to the affluent suburbs of Chicago at the dawn of the twenty-first. As each family becomes more acclimatized to their new culture, their sense of personal displacement deepens as they encounter tragedy more often than they embrace success. Bernardi's is an ethereal yet incisive. (Note - author grew up in Highwood/Highland Park area and presented at FOCUS on the Arts 2007)  
• Cusumano, Camille. The Last Cannoli. The Last Cannoli is a lively, fast-paced read in a voice that is fresh and powerful. It introduces the Donitella family, ordinary people with extraordinary tales to tell. Spanning four decades, the novel opens its mouth-watering tale in the '50s, when the father's ritual storytelling begins to take on the power of prayer amidst the cheerful cacophony of this large Sicilian-American family. The Donitellas, their house, and their stories will stay with you and you'll keep thinking of them the way one thinks of interesting people one has just met. Like Laura Esquivel's Like Water for Chocolate, The Last Cannoli is a luminous story that charms the heart and tempts the palate. It is a rich and lovely confection of a novel.  
• De Rosa, Tina. Paper Fish. Novel about Italian American immigrants set on the West Side of Chicago during the 1940s and 1950s. Carmolina is torn between the bonds of the past and the pull of the future - a need for family and a yearning for independence. As Carmolina's story unfolds, it comes to contain many other narratives : memories and legends from the old country, passed on by her wise and loving grandmother Doria; the courtship tale of her father, an Italian-American policeman with a gentle heart and an artist's soul, and her mother, a lonely Lithuanian-American waitress; and the painful story of Doriana, her beautiful, but silent sister.
• Fante, John. 1933 Was a Bad Year.  "1933" offers a pungent taste of the Italian-American experience, and explores such issues as the gulf between immigrant parents and their American-born children.   
• Lombardo, Billy. The Logic of a Rose: Chicago Stories. A collection of short stories about Italian Americans set in a fictional neighborhood on Chicago's South Side.
• Mangione, Jerre. Mount Allegro.  Depicts the lives of Sicilian immigrants in Rochester, New York, in the first half of the twentieth century as their customs blend and clash with those of their adopted country.
• Mazzucco, Melania G. Vita: a novel. In April 1903, the steamship Republic spills more than two thousand immigrants onto Ellis Island. Among them are Diamante, age twelve, and Vita, nine, sent by their poor families in southern Italy to make their way in America. Amid the chaos and splendor of New York, the misery and criminality of Little Italy, and the shady tenants of Vita's father's decrepit Prince Street boarding house, Diamante and Vita struggle to survive, to create a new life, and to become American.  
• Napoli, Donna. The King of Mulberry Street.  Drawing on her grandfather's experience, Napoli dramatizes a seldom-told bit of American history in this story of Italian Jewish young people in the 1890s. Beniamino, who lives in Napoli, is only nine years old when his beloved, poverty-stricken Mama bribes someone to hide him away on a cargo ship to America. His lively, immediate first-person narrative recalls the trauma of separation and the brutal struggle on the New York streets, where, renamed "Dom," he makes two Italian friends, and they start a business selling sandwiches. He keeps his Jewish identity secret, even as he tries to follow kosher rules. Always his dream is to return home. The characters are drawn with depth, especially the three kids, and the unsentimental story is honest about the grinding poverty and the prejudice among various immigrant groups. Most moving is the story of letting go, as Dom confronts the fact that Mama sent him away, and America is now his home.  
• Romano, Tony. When the World Was Young. In the summer of 1957, in the heart of Chicago, Agostino and Angela Rosa Peccatori are first-generation Italian immigrants trying to make their way. They have five children, all born in the U. S., and every day they see the old Italian ways losing ground to American values and culture.  
• Ruiz, Ronald L. Giuseppe Rocco. Italian immigrant Giuseppe Rocco pulls himself up from poverty to become the richest man in San Jose but never buys a business suit and continues to prefer the company of Mexican workers to the governor of the state. His experience is contrasted with that of young Sally Martinez, a Mexican American who also attempts to pull herself and her family out of poverty.
• Tonelli, Bill. The Italian American Reader: A Collection of Outstanding Fiction, Memoirs, Journalism, Essays, and Poetry.

JAPANESE

• Furiya, Linda. Bento Box in the Heartland. Author Linda Furiya reflects on her childhood in Versailles, Indiana, discussing the racism she experienced as the only Japanese girl in her school and sharing stories about her parents. Includes Japanese recipes.  
• Guterson, David. Snow Falling on Cedars.  Story of a 1954 murder on Puget Sound that has its roots in World War II and the internment of Japanese-Americans.
• Kadohata, Cynthia. Kira-Kira. Chronicles the close friendship between two Japanese-American sisters growing up in rural Georgia during the late 1950s and early 1960s, and the despair when one sister becomes terminally ill.  
• Hamamura, John. Color of the Sea.  Born in Hawaii to Japanese parents, Sam Hamada is not destined to follow in his father's footsteps as a mere plantation worker. This powerful coming-of-age novel treats the historic reality that to be a Japanese American in mid-20th century America was to be perceived as neither Japanese nor American. Here the fate of two people amid the devastation of war reveals how the promises of honor and the security of love can rescue souls and restore faith.
• Lee, Chang-Rae. A Gesture Life.  The secret life of a Japanese-American pharmacist in a small town in New York. On the surface a model of propriety and serenity, he is torn by memories of his service in the Japanese army in World War II and the comfort woman he loved and could not save.  
• Namioka, Lensey. Mismatch.  Their families clash when a Japanese-American teenaged boy starts dating a Chinese-American teenaged girl.  
• Okada, John. No-no Boy: A Novel.  AIchiro is put an a very unusual situation - because of his past decisions a lot of his peers do not accept him as Japanese or American. This story tells of Ichiro's struggle to find direction after being held in an internment camp for two years.  
• Otsuka, Julie. When the Emperor Was Divine.  Otsuka's commanding debut novel paints a portrait of the Japanese internment camps unlike any previously written--a haunting evocation of a family in wartime and an unmistakably resonant lesson for our times.  
• Patneaude, David. Thin Wood Walls.  When the Japanese bomb Pearl Harbor, Joe Hamada and his family face growing prejudice, eventually being torn away from their home and sent to a relocation camp in California, even as his older brother joins the United States Army to fight in the war. 
• Rizzuto, Rahna Reiko. Why She Left Us.  This novel tells the story of three generations of a Japanese-American family whose lives are tragically affected by the Second World War when they are interned in camps in the American West.
• Uchida, Yoshiko. Journey Home.  After their release from an American concentration camp, a Japanese-American girl and her family try to reconstruct their lives amidst strong anti-Japanese feelings which breed fear, distrust, and violence.
• Wartkski, Maureen. Candle in the Wind.  A hate crime in Boston brings together first and second generation Japanese Americans and a feisty grandmother who journeys from Japan.
  

JEWISH

• Bat-Ami, Miriam. Two Suns in the Sky: A Novel. Summer, 1944. World War II is raging in Europe. Fifteen-year-old Adam, a Yugoslavian Jew, has escaped, along with his mother and younger sister, to the safety of a refugee camp in Upstate New York. Christine, whose house is near the camp, sees in Adam's past all of the excitement and drama missing from her own life. The moment the two first see each other, they know they are meant to be together. Their parents refuse to even accept the possibility. Will their love prevail over the narrow-mindedness of the adults around them?  
• Delbanco, Nicholas. What Remains.  A novel of flight set at the end of World War II follows a German-Jewish family on their painful exodus to America from a shattered European continent.
• Ducovny, Amram. Coney.  On the eve of World War II, Brooklyn boy Harry Catzker finds fellowship among the freaks and low-lifes of Coney Island as he considers the nature of art, philosophy, and politics until a disaster changes his life.
• Jackson, Livia Bitton. Hello America.  Autobiography of 18yr. old Elli and her mother who survive Auschwitz and come in 1951 to live with relatives in New York.
• Gilmore, Jennifer. Golden Country. Chronicles the lives of three Jewish immigrants in New York between the 1920s and 1960s--a salesman, a Broadway producer, and a would-be actress--whose families are linked by childhood ties and, later, the Mob. Captures the texture of the Jewish immigrant experience: the terrible disappointments, delusions and disillusions, the ambition, hard work, family life, success and failure, compromises, sacrifice, and the limitless hope offered in this Goldene medina, this golden country.
• Goldreich, Gloria. Leah’s Journey.  Leah and her husband flee from pogroms in Russia to New York City where her family goes through a series of changes.
• Haber, Leo. The Red Heifer. The main character of Leo Haber's debut novel grows to sexual and social awareness amid old-world Yiddish-speaking rabbis, new-world mobsters, Jewish non-believers, musicians, ballplayers, and new waves of immigrants. The novel teems with unforgettable characters who grapple with traditional values and the cultural enticements of their new goldene medine (new land). The problem of Jewish survival in a free society informs every aspect of the novel, with the ancient law of the red heifer serving as the central metaphor.  
• Lasky, Kathryn. Dreams in the Golden Country. Twelve-year-old Zippy, a Jewish immigrant from Russia, keeps a diary account of her family's life on the lower east side of New York at the turn of the century. 
• Levitin, Sonia. Silver Days. 13-year-old Lisa experiences the tribulations of growing up in 1940s in New York City as a Jewish refugee. The book conveys the strength and spirit that enabled the family to not only survive being uprooted from their comfortable home in Germany, but also to make a new life for themselves.
• Levitt, Paul. Come with Me to Babylon. This stirring novel of Jewish immigration from a Russian shtetl to early twentieth-century New York challenges the clichés of the golden promised land and shows the grim reality not only of the daily struggle to survive but also of how the dream of success could lead to corruption and heartbreak. Told from constantly switching multiple viewpoints, the focus is on Ben Cohen, who is close to the radical humanism of his dad. Ben is passionately in love with a Gentile, Irina, but he is pushed by his tough mother to marry the daughter of the rich Jewish factory owner, who will give Ben a job as manager. Given that his sister lost her speech when she was burned in the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, Ben has strong misgivings about becoming a sweatshop boss. Then Irina gets pregnant. Nothing is simple. Strong-willed Mama is the one who gets the family to leave Russia. Idealistic Papa does not work. Drawing on Levitt's family stories and steeped in Yiddish idiom, the unforgettable personal drama of secrets and sacrifice is an elemental immigrant story of the journey to Babylon.  (From Booklist)
• Napoli, Donna. The King of Mulberry Street.  Drawing on her grandfather's experience, Napoli dramatizes a seldom-told bit of American history in this story of Italian Jewish young people in the 1890s. Beniamino, who lives in Napoli, is only nine years old when his beloved, poverty-stricken Mama bribes someone to hide him away on a cargo ship to America. His lively, immediate first-person narrative recalls the trauma of separation and the brutal struggle on the New York streets, where, renamed "Dom," he makes two Italian friends, and they start a business selling sandwiches. He keeps his Jewish identity secret, even as he tries to follow kosher rules. Always his dream is to return home. The characters are drawn with depth, especially the three kids, and the unsentimental story is honest about the grinding poverty and the prejudice among various immigrant groups. Most moving is the story of letting go, as Dom confronts the fact that Mama sent him away, and America is now his home.  
• Nixon, Joan Lowry. Land of Hope. Rebekah, a fifteen-year-old Jewish immigrant arriving in New York City in 1902, almost abandons her dream of getting an education when she is forced to work in a sweatshop.
• Orner, Peter. Esther Stories. This collection presents 34 stories that span America. Though the physical territory covered is broad, the emotional probing of the characters is the high point here. The book is divided into four parts: the first two concern the lives of unrelated strangers; the last two present two assimilated Jewish families, one on the East Coast, the other in the Midwest.  
• Ozick, Cynthia. Heir to the Glimmering World. James A'bair, whose father is the author of the popular series "The Bear Boy," has taken in the eccentric Mitwisser family and the orphaned Rose Meadows, who must resist the pull of the actual Bear Boy, in a novel of Depression-era New York.  
• Powers, Richard. The Time of Our Singing. Follows the marriage of David Strom, a German Jewish émigré scientist, and Della Daley, an African American singer, as they, along with their extraordinarily gifted children, struggle to overcome the racial injustices of the 1960s.
• Roth, Henry. Call It Sleep.  A novel of Jewish life in New York's Lower East Side in the early 1900s.  David Schearl is an overwrought, phobic, and dangerously imaginative little boy. He has come to New York with his East European Jewish parents, and now, in the years between 1911 and 1913, he is exposed, shock by shock, to the blows of slum life.
• Sucher, Cheryl Pearl. The Rescue of Memory. Rachel Wallfisch, the daughter of Holocaust survivors, grows up in 1960s New York, torn between the admonition to "never forget" and the desire to establish her own independence as an adult.  
• Tal, Eve. Double Crossing. In 1905, as life becomes increasingly difficult for Jews in Ukraine, eleven-year-old Raizel and her father flee to America in hopes of earning money to bring the rest of the family there, but her father's health and Orthodox faith become barriers.  
• Ulinich, Anya. Petropolis. In 1992, Sasha Goldberg, an awkward, biracial Jewish fourteen-year-old in Siberia, finds love with a homeless high school dropout, clashes with her mother, and escapes to the U.S. as a mail-order bride. From there it's off to Chicago, where, as the "pet Soviet Jew" of a rich Orthodox couple, Sasha trades one kind of servitude for another. One more escape lands our heroine in Brooklyn, in search of her father, who abandoned the family when she was an infant. For a girl from a bleak Siberian town, protagonist Sasha has a surprisingly big heart and a hysterical view of life in America. Petropolis is a compassionate and unusual novel about motherhood, immigration, and religious fanaticism.  
• Widmer, Eleanor. Up from Orchard Street. Three generations live together in a crowded tenement on the lower East Side of New York City.  
• Yezierska, Anzia. Bread Givers. A rabbi's daughter rebels against traditional Jewish immigrant society by living on her own and supporting herself.

KOREAN

• Choi, Susan. The Foreign Student. Tells the story of a young Korean man, who narrowly escaped death in his war-torn country, and a Tennessee woman haunted by sexual abuse as they find solace, comfort, and hope in each other.  
• Kim, Patti. A Cab Called Reliable. A Korean girl, newly immigrated to the US, struggles to transcend the chaos of a strange land and of a violent, overstressed family.
• Lee, Chang-Rae. Native Speaker. Henry Park, a Korean-American private spy, is challenged by a new assignment to investigate a rising politician, but the secrets he uncovers threaten his cultural identity and his relationship with his wife.

• Lee, Marie. Finding My Voice.  As she tries to enjoy her senior year and choose w