Immigration, Exile and Displacement

As Jim Burden sets down his memories of growing up as a pioneer in Black Hawk, Nebraska, his thoughts keep returning to the immigrant girl he befriended, and what she truly meant to him.

Documenting life before, during, and after crossing the US/Mexico border, these poems explore the emotional impacts of immigration and the ongoing search for belonging.

With a heavenly voice and a hit song, Irish charmer Patrick Murphy has a talent for music and an eye for the ladies. With two women pursuing their quarry in 1950’s New York, a third joins them from Ireland and she always gets what she wants.

After Pearl Harbour, German immigrants and family restaurateurs Nina and Otto Aust are accused by the American authorities of being Nazis. Separated from each other and their teenage and sons, can their bonds of love break the chains of fear and suspicion?

Told through several voices, a family takes a road trip south from New York to Apacheria because the Apaches were “the last of something”. Meanwhile, thousands of children from Central and South America risk their lives to cross the US border. Two journeys. Two different directions. One story of being human in an inhumane world.

An impassioned argument by a young Mexican American woman for the abolition of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

Required reading for anyone keen to understand the struggles illegal immigrants face coming to America and get a perspective from the ‘other side of the fence’.

If home is where the heart is, then maybe "Adios, Happy Homeland!" is home for these bunch of Cuban exile writers. This collection is a critical look at life, and pulls apart and reassembles the myths that have come to define her culture.

We’re taken into a sick man’s fever dream as he waits for a train beneath a strange night sky, into a community of parachute makers facing the end in a windy town that no longer exists, and onto a Cuban beach where the body of a boy last seen on a boat bound for America turns out to be a giant jellyfish. With Adios Happy Homeland!, Menéndez puts a contemporary twist on the troubled history of Cuba and offers a wry and poignant perspective on the conundrum of cultural displacement.

"Leaving Beirut" was said to be "'[o]ne of the most poignant testimonies to the Lebanese civil war" by critics. And this is Mai Ghoussoub's quiet force of a memoir and testimony of the tough times in Lebanon.

Complete with postmodern literary touches, the novel-slash-memoir remembers the war through not just one woman's memories, but with readings in history, newspaper headlines and television reportage as well. And she reflects: who would she have been if she had not witnessed bonds of friendship turn in to animosities, and decent human beings transformed into villains? She remembers the stories of revenge and retaliation she once tried to escape, and finds herself drawn back to them, as events — past or present — in Bosnia, Rwanda or Argentina remind her of the tragedies that shaped her life.

Book of Clouds is a haunting, masterfully wrought debut novel about a young Mexican woman adrift in Berlin, where a string of fateful encounters leads to romance, violence, and revelation.

It's a magical, profound portrait of a city forever in flux, and of the myths we cling to in order to give shape to our lives.

Porochista Khakpour's mythic yet crushingly realistic tale begins with a boy raised among birds in Iran, rejected by his mother who believes she gave birth to a "White Demon. But once freed, he's sent to New York where he's eroticized and objectied to no end.

Khakpour is one of Iran's finest novelists, and her shocking yet tender tale of this violent upheaval is a must-read.

For anyone who is (and was once!) a young, struggling immigrant trying to be the model minority, Alina Bronsky's novel might be a tale close to the heat.

17-year-old Sascha Naimann lives in Berlin's Russian ghetto with her two younger siblings and, until recently, her mother. Growing up is tough, but she faces alienation, isolation and loneliness in her days. She longs, not to escape fro the tough project (yet), but to be a writer instead. Bronsky writes a heart wrenchingly honest tale of simple yet tough dreams.

Two protagonists, both arriving in the United States from opposite ends of the Caribbean. The first, from Colombia with her family as a baby, and the other, a newly arrived solitary Cuban defector.

They're different, but perhaps not that after all. Patricia Engel delivers a profound and riveting Pan-American story of fractured lives finding solace and redemption in the beauty and power of the natural world, and in one another.

Millions of people have fled from conflicts and persecution in all parts of the Northeast African country of Sudan, and many thousands more have been enslaved as human spoils of war.

Here, in their own words, men and women recount life before their displacement and the reasons for their flight, and provide insight on the major stations of the “refugee railroads” — the desert camps of Khartoum, the underground communities of Cairo, the humanitarian metropolis of Kakuma refugee camp,

"Out of Exile" is no fiction, it's reality. And reality is often not pretty. From political and religious persecution, to abduction by paramilitary groups, these are stories of escape of war and violence.

May, 1992. Hana is twelve years old when her older sister Atka puts her on a UN evacuation bus fleeing the besieged city of Sarajevo. But as the Bosnian war escalates and months go by without contact, their promise to each other to be brave becomes deeply significant. Hana is forced to cope as a refugee in Croatia, while Atka and their younger siblings battle for survival in a city overwhelmed by crime and destruction.

Goodbye Sarajevo is a true story of love, courage and survival and is a unique account of the siege from two different ends. The journal entries of both sisters are an illuminating look into how a bond, torn apart by war, was kept alive through their faith and promise to each other.

Beginning in America, and spilling back over memories and generations to India, Unaccustomed Earth explores the heart of family life and the immigrant experience. Eight luminous stories — longer and richer than any Jhumpa Lahiri has yet written — take us from America to Europe, India and Thailand as they follow new lives forged in the wake of loss.

For those who move around, voluntarily or not, where is home?

"I Was Born Here, I was Born There" traces the life of Palestinian author Mourid Barghouti — early life in Palestine, expulsion from Cairo, exile to Budapest, marriage to one of Egypt's leading writers and critics (Radwa Ashour), the birth of his son, Tamim, and then the young man's own expulsion from Cairo. Ranging freely back and forth in time Barghouti weaves into it his account poignant evocations of Palestinian history and daily life. Evocative, haunting, and beautifully written.

The Portrait of Lady is no violent exile or displacement, but it's immigration woes at its most lyrical. Isabel Archer and her suitor Gilbert Osmond are Americans living in Europe. And the desolation she consequently feels is not merely at being away from home, but is in the absence in her life of love and ultimately of any meaning. Henry James wrote wonderful novels of the American life and way in the 19th Century, and this one is full of longing, despair and ennui rolled into one.