How to Belong in America
The Other Americans begins with blood. In the first pages of the Pulitzer finalist Laila Lalami’s new novel, a Moroccan immigrant named Driss Guerraoui is struck by a vehicle one evening while leaving the diner he owns, near California’s Mojave Desert. The car speeds off, its driver either unconcerned—or, worse yet, satisfied.
Through the perspectives of nine alternating narrators, including Driss himself, Lalami threads together an account of the slain man’s journey to America and the life he toiled to build after his arrival. The first character introduced is Nora, Driss’s American-born daughter, who moves back to her hometown after her father’s suspicious death. Her thoughts are crisply relayed, her grief overwhelming in its clarity: “My father was killed on a spring night four years ago, while
