Catalog Search Results
1) The namesake
Author
Appears on these lists
Fitchburg - Fiction set in MA
Jones Library's Local Author Spotlight - Catherine Newman's Favorite Books
Jones Library's Local Author Spotlight - Catherine Newman's Favorite Books
Description
"With a new afterword from Jhumpa Lahiri, a new edition of the contemporary classic. Meet the Ganguli family, new arrivals from Calcutta, trying their best to become Americans even as they pine for home. The name they bestow on their firstborn, Gogol, betrays all the conflicts of honoring tradition in a new world--conflicts that will haunt Gogol on his own winding path through divided loyalties, comic detours, and wrenching love affairs. In The Namesake,...
Author
Pub. Date
2013
Formats
Description
The author's first novel is a story about an American girl in Paris, who navigates the intoxicating and treacherous complexities of independence, friendship, and romance. Lita del Cielo, the daughter of two Colombian orphans who arrived in America with nothing and made a fortune with their Latin food empire, has been granted one year to pursue her studies in Paris before she must return to work in the family business. She moves into a gently crumbling...
Author
Series
Maddalena novels volume 3
Formats
Description
It's been fifty years since Antonio Grasso married Maddalena and brought her to America. That was the last time she saw her parents, her sisters and brothers-everything she knew and loved in the village of Santa Cecilia, Italy. Maddalena sees no need to open the door to the past and let the emotional baggage and unmended rifts of another life spill out.
But Prima was raised on the lore of the Old Country. And as she sees her parents aging, she...
Author
Series
Maddalena novels volume 2
Formats
Description
It is 1953 in the tight-knit Italian neighborhood in Wilmington, Delaware. Maddalena Grasso has lost her country, her family, and the man she loved by coming to America; her mercurial husband, Antonio, has lost his opportunity to realize the American Dream; their new friend, Guilio Fabbri, a shy accordion player, has lost his beloved parents.
In the shadow of St. Anthony's Church, named for the patron saint of lost things, the prayers of these troubled...
Author
Appears on list
Description
"Thirtysomething Flores and her mother, Paula, still live in the same Brooklyn apartment, but that may be the only thing they have in common. It's been nearly three years since they lost beloved husband and father Martín, who had always been the bridge between them. One day, cleaning beneath his urn, Flores discovers a note written in her mother's handwriting: Perdóname si te falle. Recuerda que siempre te quise. ("Forgive me if I failed you. Remember...
7) Housegirl
Author
Description
A moving and unexpectedly funny exploration of friendship and family, shame and forgiveness, Michael Donkor's debut novel follows three adolescent girls grappling with a shared experience: the joys and sorrows of growing up. Belinda knows how to follow the rules. As a housegirl, she has learned the right way to polish water glasses, to wash and fold a hundred handkerchiefs, and to keep a tight lid on memories of the village she left behind when she...
Author
Series
Appears on list
Description
"The youngest of four daughters in a family that left Poland in the 1920s for the crowded tenements of New York City's Lower East Side, Sara Smolinsky has seen her sisters resign themselves under their rabbi father's iron fist to loveless marriages and empty futures. They are bread givers, working to feed the family while their father studies the Torah--according to which, as their father reminds them, a woman without her father or husband is less...
Author
Pub. Date
2022.
Description
"A love story set in the foothills of Appalachia about two very different people--Owen, from Kentucky, and Alma, the daughter of Bosnian immigrants--navigating the entanglements of class and identify in an America coming apart at the seams"--
In the run-up to the 2016 election, Owen Callahan, an aspiring writer, moves back to Kentucky to live with his Trump-supporting uncle and grandfather. Eager to clean up his act after wasting time and potential...
Author
Pub. Date
[2017]
Formats
Description
This collection presents characters in the midst of personal and national crises. We meet a failed poet who, envious of other people's wealth during the real-estate bubble, becomes an embezzler; a clavichordist whose dreams of art collapse under the obligations of marriage and fatherhood; and, in "Bronze," a sexually confused college freshman whose encounter with a stranger on a train leads to a revelation about his past and his future.
Author
Description
In New Orleans, three daughters of a former beauty queen and Vietnamese refugee obsessed with zodiac signs are trying to go about their modern lives, but begin to encounter strange glimpses of long-buried secrets from their ancestors.
What does the future hold for those born in the years of the Dragon, Tiger, and Goat? In present day New Orleans, Xuan Trung, former beauty queen turned refugee after the Fall of Saigon, is obsessed with divining her...
Author
Appears on list
Description
"Set in New York and China over three decades, Paper Names explores what it means to be American from three different perspectives. There's Tony, a Chinese-born engineer turned Manhattan doorman, who immigrated to the United States to give his family a better life. His daughter, Tammy, who we meet at age nine and follow through adulthood, and who grapples with the expectations of a first generation American and her own personal desires. Finally, there's...
Author
Description
"Palestine, 1990. Seventeen-year-old Isra prefers reading books to entertaining the suitors her father has chosen for her. Over the course of a week, the naïve and dreamy girl finds herself quickly betrothed and married, and is soon living in Brooklyn. There Isra struggles to adapt to the expectations of her oppressive mother-in-law Fareeda and strange new husband Adam, a pressure that intensifies as she begins to have children -- four daughters...
Author
Publisher
Make Me A World
Pub. Date
[2021]
Appears on list
Description
"Nima doesn't feel understood. By her mother, who grew up far away in a different land. By her suburban town, which makes her feel too much like an outsider to fit in and not enough like an outsider to feel like that she belongs somewhere else. At least she has her childhood friend Haitham, with whom she can let her guard down and be herself. Until she doesn't. As the ground is pulled out from under her, Nima must grapple with the phantom of a life...
Author
Formats
Description
S. Gagliano & Son has been a barber shop fixture in South Philly for decades. Frankie and Michael Gagliano's Italian immigrant father—Luigi to his customers, Papa to his sons—presides over the store, enlisting his children as soon as they're big enough to wield a broom. On their mother's deathbed, eight-year-old Frankie swears that he and his little brother will always take care of each other, a vow he endeavors to keep through their father's...
16) Homeland elegies
Author
Appears on these lists
Description
"A deeply personal work about identity and belonging in a nation coming apart at the seams, Homeland Elegies blends fact and fiction to tell an epic story of longing and dispossession in the world that 9/11 made. Part family drama, part social essay, part picaresque novel, at its heart it is the story of a father, a son, and the country they both call home. Ayad Akhtar forges a new narrative voice to capture a country in which debt has ruined countless...
Author
Description
The story of a Latin American science fiction writer and the lives her lost manuscript unites decades later in post-Katrina New Orleans. In 1929 in New Orleans, a Dominican immigrant named Adana Moreau writes a science fiction novel. The novel earns rave reviews, and Adana begins a sequel. Then she falls gravely ill. Just before she dies, she destroys the only copy of the manuscript. Decades later in Chicago, Saul Drower is cleaning out his dead grandfather's...
Author
Description
"A stunning debut novel, from Rhodes Scholar and winner of the Caine Prize for African Writing, Tope Folarin about a Nigerian family living in Utah and their uncomfortable assimilation to American life. Living in small-town Utah has always been an uneasy fit for Tunde Akinola's family, especially for his Nigeria-born parents. Though Tunde speaks English with a Midwestern accent, he can't escape the children who rub his skin and ask why the black...
Author
Appears on these lists
Springfield - Children's Novels Celebrating Hispanic Heritage Month
Webster - Middle Grade Latinx Titles
Webster - Middle Grade Latinx Titles
Description
""We need books to break open our hearts, so that we might feel more deeply, so that we might be more human in these unkind times. This is a book doing work of the spirit in a time of darkness." --Sandra Cisneros, author of The House on Mango Street Efrén Nava's Amá is his Superwoman--or Soperwoman, named after the delicious Mexican sopes his mother often prepares. Both Amá and Apá work hard all day to provide for the family, making sure Efrén...
Author
Formats
Description
"Our narrator, Francisco Goldberg, an American writer, has been living and working in Mexico City as a journalist for over a decade, but has recently returned to New York City in hopes of 'going home again.' It's been five years since the end of his last relationship and he is falling in love again with a new woman. Soon, though, he is beckoned back to Boston by his former high school girlfriend who was witness to his greatest youthful humiliations,...
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