40+ Great Stories About Immigrants Recommended by You
This Riot Recommendation for great stories about immigrants is sponsored by How to Love a Jamaican by Alexia Arthurs.
Tenderness and cruelty, loyalty and betrayal, ambition and regret—award-winning author Alexia Arthurs navigates these tensions to extraordinary effect in her debut collection. Bestselling author Zadie Smith calls it “thrilling” and says “Alexia Arthurs is all too easy to love.” These intimate tales take on today’s important topics—race, class, immigration, teenage pregnancy, and gay culture. Sweeping from close-knit island communities in Jamaican to the streets of New York City and Midwestern university towns, these eleven stories—most never-before-published—form a portrait of a nation, a people, and a way of life. How to Love a Jamaican, available now.
Great stories about immigrants can be found in fiction, history, children’s books, YA, graphic novels, memoir, romance…And they can give you some insight into an experience outside your own, or remind you of your immigrant parents, or just be a rewarding way to spend an afternoon reading. Or all of the above! We’re always on the lookout for our next good read. So we asked you to share your picks for great stories about immigrants, and below you’ll find just some of your recommendations.
Night Sky with Exit Wounds by Ocean Vuong
Girl in Translation by Jean Kwok
On Black Sister’s Street by China Unigwe
In The Country by Mia Alvar
Fresh Off the Boat by Eddie Huang
Lena Finkle’s Magic Barrel by Anya Ulinich
My New American Life by Francine Prose
The Consequences of Love by Sulaiman Addonia
The Arrival by Shaun Tan
The Best We Could Do by The Bui
The Red Umbrella by Christina Diaz Gonzalez
That Thing We Call a Heart by Sheba Karim
Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides
The Book of Unknown Americans by Cristina Henríquez
Grandfather’s Journey by Allen Say
Map of Home by Randa Jarrar
My Two Blankets by Irena Kobald
Ghana Must Go by Taiye Selasi
Almost a Woman by Esmeralda Santiago
How The García Girls Lost Their Accents by Julia Alvarez
Here I Am by Patti Kim and illustrated by Sonia Sánchez
We Need New Names by NoViolet Bulawayo
I’m New Here by Anne Sibley O’Brien
Don’t Let Him Know by Sandip Roy
The Mango Bride by Marvin Soliven
Inside Out And Back Again by Thanhha Lai
The Name Jar by Yangsook Choi
The Refugees by Viet Thanh Nguyen
Funny in Farsi by Firoozeh Dumas
The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down by Anne Fadiman
Breath, Eyes, Memory by Edwidge Danticat
The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears by Dinaw Mengestu
The Keeping Quilt by Patricia Polacco
In The Country We Love by Diane Guerrero
Esperanza Rising by Pam Muñoz Ryan
Island of a Thousand Mirrors by Naomi Munaweera
Americanah by Chimamanda Adichie
The Bread Givers by Anzia Yezierska
The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri
Bilingual Blues by Gustavo Pérez Firmat
American Born Chinese by Gene Luen Yang
