10 Cross-Cultural Novels that Illuminate the World We Live In

This powerful story of race and gender is centered on Ifemelu, a brilliant and self-assured young woman who departs military-ruled Nigeria for an American university where, for the first time, she is forced to grapple with her identity as a black woman. Ifemelu faces difficult choices and challenges, suffers defeats and triumphs, finds and loses relationships, and eventually achieves success as the writer of an eye-opening blog about race in America. Fearless and gripping, Americanah is a richly told story set in today’s globalized world.

Full of dead-on wit and relentlessly funny, this tour de force confirms Zadie Smith’s reputation as a major literary talent. Smith notes that she “has taken Howards End, that marvelous tale of class difference, and upped the ante by adding race, politics, and gender.”

Far from the casinos and lights, the Las Vegas suburbs sprawl out into the desert. In this desolate boomtown, three desperate souls—a middle aged woman attempting to revive her marriage, a veteran just returned from Iraq, and a brave eight-year-old Albanian boy—must decide whether to give in to despair, or to find the courage and resilience to rise.

This culinary fairy tale about an Indian boy from Mumbai who becomes a three-star chef in Paris was the basis for a feature film starring Helen Mirren. Lively and brimming with the colors, flavors, and scents of the kitchen, The Hundred-Foot Journey is a succulent treat about family, nationality, and the mysteries of good taste.

Set against the backdrop of tumultuous, war-torn Afghanistan, THE KITE RUNNER is an unforgettable and heartbreaking story of friendship, family, and redemption.

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When Malik Solanka finds himself filled with inexplicable rage, he abandons his family in London and flees to New York. This astonishing work of explosive energy is an alarming, heartbreaking, and deviously funny depiction of the human condition in the twenty-first century.

This family epic set in the Belgian Congo in 1959 is narrated by the wife and four daughters of Nathan Price, an evangelical Baptist missionary. Told over the course of three decades in postcolonial Africa, it is the story of one family and one nation’s tragic undoing.

In this masterpiece of American realism and Shakespearean consequence, Andre Dubus III's unforgettable characters—people with ordinary flaws, looking for a small piece of ground to stand on—careen toward inevitable conflict, their tragedy painting a shockingly true picture of the country we live in today.

Lyrical, intensely moving and steeped in magical realism, this spellbinding novel explores the thin wall between myth and reality through the alternating tales of two young women. Maja is a London-born Afro-Cuban singer who struggles to negotiate her heritage and her physical home, and Yemaya is living in the claustrophobic space between two worlds, London and Lagos.

Homeless and starving in the Topanga Canyon, Mexican illegal immigrants Candido and America Rincon’s pursuit of the American dream is quickly unraveling. When they unexpectedly cross paths with Los Angeles couple Delaney and Kyra, their lives intersect in what becomes a tragicomedy of error and misunderstanding.