14 Novels That Portray Diverse and Resilient American Families

Greek immigrant Stavros Stavros Mavrakis believes he has just ten days to live. Brimming with pride and cursing in broken English, he sends an email to his three daughters and ex-wife outlining his wishes for how they might live better lives. They react just as you’d expect.

This series of artfully interwoven tales chronicles a community of Mexican immigrants in Los Angeles who work as cleaners, gardeners, and day laborers as they chase the American dream. Eye-opening and deeply human, it illuminates an often hidden segment of American life.

The promise and tragedy of post-war America is charted in this riveting portrait of an Irish-American family as they chase the American Dream. It is at once expansive and exquisitely detailed, but what readers will remember most is the huge heart at its core. It heralds the arrival of a major new talent in contemporary fiction and is destined to be an American classic.

Inspired by Dorothea Lange’s “Migrant Mother” photograph, Marisa Silver’s MARY COIN is the story of two women in the American Depression of 1936—one a famous photographer and one a migrant laborer in search of work—and their remarkable chance encounter that produced one of the most iconic images of the Great Depression.

An Iranian immigrant to the United States spends the last of his savings to purchase his first home at auction. But when he encounters the previous owner, a self-destructive alcoholic who wants her home back, their personal confrontation exemplifies how a home represents more than just a place to live and is a beacon of the American dream.

Spanning forty years, this is the turbulent story of Tom Wingo and his gifted and troubled twin sister, Savannah, as they struggle to triumph over the dark and tragic legacy of their childhoods in the marshland of the South with a violent father and manipulative mother.

An epic and unforgettable story of a 1950s man determined to protect the woman he loves from the small East Texas town desperate to destroy her. Full of life, exquisitely written, and suffused with the pastoral beauty of the rural South, RUBY is a transcendent novel of passion and courage.

Sherman Alexie vividly weaves memory, fantasy, and stark reality to paint a portrait of life in and around a Spokane Indian reservation. Set against a backdrop of addiction, car accidents, laughter, and basketball, these stories portray the reservation’s strong sense of community and attitude of hope to persevere despite the odds.

In 1949 four Chinese women, recent immigrants to San Francisco, begin meeting to eat dim sum, play mahjong, and talk—and the Joy Luck Club is born. Over the years and the births of their daughters, they become united in their shared experiences of loss and hope, choosing to gather and raise their spirits rather than sink into tragedy.

This powerful, tender story of race and gender is centered on Ifemelu, a brilliant 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. Her defeats and triumphs are a richly told story set in today’s globalized world.

Set in 1954 on San Piedro Island, north of Puget Sound, a local fisherman is found suspiciously drowned, and a Japanese American named Kabuo Miyamoto is charged with his murder. In the course of the ensuing trial, it becomes clear that what is at stake is more than a man's guilt—the community is still haunted by the memory of its Japanese residents being sent into exile during World War II while their neighbors watched.

Oscar is a sweet but disastrously overweight ghetto nerd who—from the New Jersey home he shares with his old-world mother and rebellious sister—dreams of becoming the Dominican J. R. R. Tolkien and, most of all, finding love. But because of a curse that has haunted his family for generations, Oscar may never get what he wants.

This contemporary American epic, which won the Pulitzer Prize, recounts the history of three generations of the Greek-American Stephanides family, centering on their intersex child Calliope, whose evolution from Callie to Cal is just one of the moving transformations in this exquisite novel.

Toward the end of World War II, four Buffalo Soldiers from the Army’s Negro 92nd Division find themselves separated from their unit and behind enemy lines. Risking their lives for a country in which they are treated with less respect than the enemy they are fighting, they discover humanity and small miracles in the residents of the small Tuscan village of St. Anna di Stazzema.