
Solidarity Stories Book Club: "The Other Americans" by Laila Lalami
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Join the Prince George’s County Office of Human Rights and the Mount Rainier Branch Library for our monthly Solidarity Stories Book Club! This month we will discuss The Other Americans by Pulitzer Prize winning author Laila Lalami.
Late one spring night, Driss Guerraoui, a Moroccan immigrant living 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, an old friend of Nora's and an Iraq War veteran; Coleman, a detective who is slowly discovering her son's secrets; Anderson, a neighbor trying to reconnect with his family; and the murdered man himself.
As the characters--deeply divided by race, religion, and class--tell their stories, connections among them emerge, even as Driss's family confronts its secrets, a town faces its hypocrisies, and love, messy and unpredictable, is born. The Other Americans is a timely and powerful novel about the suspicious death of a Moroccan immigrant--at once a family saga, a murder mystery, and a love story, informed by the treacherous fault lines of American culture.
—From Catalog.
Borrow the book from PGCMLS: Print | eBook | eAudiobook
The Solidarity Stories Book Club takes place on the 3rd Tuesday of each month in the upstairs lounge area of miXt Food Hall in Brentwood, MD. Limited parking is available via the garage on 39th St & Rhode Island Ave. Parking is free for program participants and no purchase is required, but participants are welcome to order snacks, drinks, or dinner from miXt’s vendors. For more information, visit their website: https://mixtfoodhall.com