From the Pulitzer Prize finalist and Booker Prize-longlisted author of The Moor’s Account, a timely and powerful novel about the suspicious death of a Moroccan immigrant that is at once a family saga, a murder mystery and a love story.
‘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 NGUYEN
There 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.
- The anticipated novel from critically acclaimed author Laila Lalami, The Other Americans is a tender and intelligent portrayal of life, love and loss in modern America that has already received accolades from J. M. Coetzee, John Boyne and Viet Thanh Nguyen. It was also selected as a 2019 fiction highlight by the Huffington Post, Vulture, Nylon, Bustle, The Millions, ElectricLit and the Boston Globe
- The Moor’s Account was a Pulitzer Prize finalist and was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2015. It also won the American Book Award, the Arab American Book Award and the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award Pantheon, an imprint of Knopf Doubleday, are to publish in the US
Reviews
“This deftly constructed account of a crime and its consequences shows up, in its quiet way, the pressures under which ordinary Americans have labored since the events of 9/11” – J.M. Coetzee
“A provocative and gripping novel by a gifted writer” – John Boyne, author of ‘A Ladder to the Sky’ and ‘The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas’
Author Biography
Laila Lalami is the author of three successful novels including The Moor’s Account, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, longlisted for the Man Booker Prize and won the American Book Award. She has written for publications including the Guardian and the New York Times, and is the recipient of a British Council Fellowship, a Fulbright Fellowship and a Guggenheim Fellowship. She lives in Los Angeles.