Books from United States

Fifteen-year-old Ana Canción has never dreamed of leaving the Dominican countryside, but when Juan Ruiz, a man twice her age, offers to marry her and take her to New York City, her family sees an opportunity for a better future. On New Year’s Day in 1965, Ana leaves behind everything she knows and arrives in Washington Heights, where she finds herself trapped in an unhappy marriage with a controlling and unfaithful husband. Lonely and struggling to adapt to life in a new country, she begins to imagine a future beyond the narrow role expected of her. When Juan returns to the Dominican Republic amid growing political turmoil, Ana discovers new freedoms through English lessons, friendships, and an unexpected romantic connection with his younger brother, César. But her growing independence clashes with her family’s hopes and the sacrifices expected of her. Set against the backdrop of the Dominican Civil War and the Dominican immigrant community in New York, Dominicana is a moving coming-of-age story about migration, womanhood, and the courage to claim a life of one’s own.

In the final days of the Gold Rush, two Chinese American siblings, Lucy and Sam, find themselves orphaned in a hostile landscape where their very existence challenges the myth of the American West. Carrying their father’s body across a vast, unforgiving terrain, they search for a place to bury him and confront the secrets of their family’s past. Through memories of hunger, displacement, and their parents’ desperate pursuit of belonging, the siblings must decide what it means to inherit a country that refuses to claim them. Lyrical and haunting, C Pam Zhang’s debut reimagines the Western frontier through the eyes of those written out of its history, exploring race, family, survival, and the price of the American dream.

Some families carry their history in photographs and stories. Others bury it in silence, leaving the next generation to piece together the fragments. Kiều, a Vietnamese-German journalist living in Berlin, calls herself Kim because it is easier for Europeans to pronounce. She has spent years distancing herself from her Vietnamese heritage, content to live without asking too many questions about her family’s past. But when an unexpected message arrives from her estranged uncle in California announcing that her grandmother is dying, the carefully maintained distance begins to collapse. Travelling to America with her parents, Kiều encounters a family divided by the Vietnam War. Her father supported the communist revolution, while his brother sided with the Americans. Decades of silence have left their competing memories unresolved, and the family reunion brings buried conflicts, painful loyalties, and forgotten stories back to the surface. Moving between generations and continents, Brothers and Ghosts explores how war shapes families long after the fighting ends. Khuê Phạm examines the complicated inheritance of migration: the languages lost, identities reshaped, and histories passed down incompletely. It is a moving story about belonging, memory, and the courage to ask questions that previous generations could not bear to answer.