The Other Americans

By: Laila Lalami

Narrated by: Laurence Bouvard, Houda Echouafni, Youssef Kerkour, John Moratis, Gabriel Porras, Laila Pyne, Christopher Ragland, Jared Zeus, Jeannette Robinson

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 neighbour 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' family is forced to confront its secrets, a town faces its hypocrisies and love, in all its messy and unpredictable forms, is born.

©2019 Leila Lalami (P)2019 Audible, Ltd

Critic reviews

"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)