The Other Americans

A Novel

By: Laila Lalami

Narrated by: Mozhan Marnò, P.J. Ochlan, Adenrele Ojo, Ozzie Rodriguez, Susan Nezami, Ali Nasser, Mark Bramhall, Max Adler, Meera Simhan

Length: 10 hrs and 45 mins

Publisher's summary

Finalist for the National Book Award in Fiction
Finalist for the Kirkus Prize in Fiction
Winner of the Arab American Book Award in Fiction
Named a Best Book of the Year by Time, the Washington Post, BookPage, NPR, the Guardian, Variety, New York Public Library, Minneapolis Star Tribune, Dallas Morning News, and Kirkus Reviews.

From the Pulitzer Prize finalist and author of The Moor’s Account, here is a timely and powerful novel about the suspicious death of a Moroccan immigrant—at once a family saga, a murder mystery, and a love story, informed by the treacherous fault lines of American culture.

Late one spring night, Driss Guerraoui, a Moroccan immigrant living in California, is walking across a darkened intersection when he is killed by a speeding car. The repercussions of his death bring together a diverse cast of characters: Guerraoui’s daughter Nora, a jazz composer who returns to the small town in the Mojave she thought she'd left for good; his widow, Maryam, who still pines after her life in the old country; Efraín, an undocumented witness whose fear of deportation prevents him from coming forward; Jeremy, an old friend of Nora's and an Iraq War veteran; Coleman, a detective who is slowly discovering her son's secrets; Anderson, a neighbor trying to reconnect with his family; and the murdered man himself.

As the characters—deeply divided by race, religion, and class—tell their stories, connections among them emerge, even as Driss’s family confronts its secrets, a town faces its hypocrisies, and love, messy and unpredictable, is born.

©2019 Laila Lalami (P)2019 Random House Audio

Critic reviews

***2019 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST***

One of Time Magazine's Best Fiction of 2019

Named a Most Anticipated Book for 2019: Entertainment Weekly, The Boston Globe, New York Magazine/Vulture, The Millions, Bustle, Electric Literature, Nylon, HuffPost, BookPage, The BBC, and Buzzfeed

"Powerful . . . Fascinating . . . Heartbreaking . . . It matters desperately . . . The novel opens into a collective confessional . . . At the core of The Other Americans is a deep anxiety: What if the truth is contradictory or so obfuscated that we lose the will to pursue it? For the reader, the novel presents something of a Rorschach test. Will our belief and sympathy depend on the speaker’s racial or gender identity, or perhaps his or her age?" —The New York Times Book Review

"'Other Americans take center stage in a timely new novel . . . You feel like the promise of America can still come through after all."—Fresh Air, Maureen Corrigan

Undermined by poor narration

I wish I’d read the book instead. The narration for Jeremy and for Coleman were so bad that I found it difficult to follow the story. Which is too bad because it’s a cleverly told tale of the way we’re all subject to implicit bias, no matter our background. Though some aspects of the plot were easy to predict, there were still some surprises. Unfortunately, I kept thinking I missed important details because I would often tune out when these two characters were carrying the story. If it weren’t for my book club in a few days, I would have returned this and picked up a print copy of the book.

Engaging story; well performed.

I listened to this story while cleaning my house and it made the time fly. I loved the complex characters, the slow unfolding of the story, the underlying police investigation.

Everyone is getting this book for Christmas

This is an amazing psychoanalysis of the ramifications of our past on our future, as well as on our perception of reality, as a whole.

In a time when empathy is running low, this book is a must-read.

Beautiful writing, but a bit shallow.

I finished The Other Americans by Laila Lalami earlier today, and I have mixed feelings. My next novels are listed at the end!

I loved Lalami's voice. Her matter-of-fact descriptions set an amazing tone that reminded me of Steinbeck, earnest and heartfelt. The structure felt authentic. Bouncing between characters to set a rounded view of the world seemed the right choice. There is a major "but" coming, though.

I felt like she went the contrived route. I foresaw the ending early on, so the mystery portion of the text fell short. On top of that, I felt like her glimpses into the lives of all these characters wasn't full enough. They all felt flat with a tiny stick of internal conflict propping them up. The types of conflict included held a lot of promise, but she never satisfied my hunger for exploration or resolution (which is where a lot of my mixed feelings derive from: is life ever satisfying?).

Overall, I enjoyed the read, but it isn't one I would list as one of my favorite reads.

My next novels (yeah, I'm doing two) are: Erotic Stories for Junjabi Widows and Exhalation.

An Immigration Story

The story is uneven. It is almost a great book, but falls short in a few ways. The narration didn't help. The Jeremy reader made the character seem petulant, yet this character had a rich story that I could have liked better if I read the book, I suspect. But who doesn't love Mark Bramhall? The others were adequate but really didn't enrich their character. This might have been improved by a single narrator. The story offered a one of everything character, too: Arab, Mexican, Black, Gay, Veteran, Angry White Guy, Drug Addict...am I leaving anything out? That felt gimmicky to me.

But with all that criticism, I am glad I listened to this book. I suspect Ill think of it time and again as I watch the news and reflect on the world as it is.

Easy to listen to and follow.

I mostly enjoyed the end, when everything came together and it finally made sense (kind of.) I also appreciated the combination of characters and their different backgrounds.

Solid Premise w-Scattered Execution

There’s a strong novel buried in the book we get here. In fact, I’d even say there are two potentially strong novels here. As it is, though, neither gets either the room or the attention really to shine out, and the result is a novel substantially weaker than Lalami’s earlier, excellent The Moor’s Account.

The Moor’s Account shone because it offered a different foundational narrative for America. Our narrator, Mustafa/Estebanico, is a Muslim slave of a would-be Spanish conquistador, and he takes part in a dramatically failed expedition to find gold in modern day Florida. It’s a big topic told from the striking perspective of a man of color, a Muslim, a slave, and someone opposed to the whole colonial project.

Yet, in a way, he is an “other American,” himself – a figure whose story informs our larger American one even as he falls outside of the histories we tell ourselves.

If The Moor’s Account is a sustained (and successful) exercise in voice, this is a quilt of different voices. Instead of sustained chapters in which Mustafa/Estebanico sorts through the contradictions of his life and addresses his fears that he will be forgotten, we get short chapters from a range of different perspectives. The book seldom sits still long enough to give us a developed character. Above all, for me at least, this falls short because of the way it interrupts one account after another, deferring not just plot points but the full expression of the characters we encounter.

That said, the premise – or I should say the original premise – is very strong. A Muslim restaurant owner is killed in a hit-and-run that might have been a hate crime.

In the first half of the book, we have a kind of whodunit, with the victim’s daughter – Nora, our central character – intent on figuring out who’s guilty. There’s a sub-plot of an undocumented Mexican-American man who witnessed a part of the accident who has to decide whether to report what he saw, or almost saw. There’s another about a high school friend of Nora’s who kindles a you-can-see-it-coming romance with her. And there’s a sister who, seemingly perfect in her American success, is hiding a painkiller addition. And there’s the older white man who owns the bowling alley next door and nurses a politics of resentment. And there is the African-American female detective who, good at her job also juggles the responsibilities of being a worried mother. And there is the mother who wishes she’d never come to America. And there is the dead father who, conveniently, supplies flashbacks just in time to resolve seeming mysteries.

So, yeah, I don’t think it’s much of a mystery, and I don’t think Lalami does either. Roughly halfway through we [SPOILER:] learn that the car that hit Driss was owned by the bowling alley owner next door.

At that point, the premise seems to shift from solving a mystery to coming to terms with the seeming reality that it’s hard to find the line between accident and malice. Oh, and while we’re at it, Nora’s romance with Jeremy heats up so that she is both angrily grieving her father and instantly falling in love with someone she hasn’t thought of since high school.

I think the best of the novel deals with the gray area of the crime/accident, and Lalami has some moments of impressive insight all along. She does a strong job bringing the mother’s voice forward, and she often gets off a strong inner monologue for a character in the midst of an emotional crisis. But, since none of that is sustained and we have so wide a range of different characters, those insights seldom accumulate into something sustained and moving.

[SECOND SPOILER:] At the end, just as the novel seems to lean into its premise that love, mourning, racism, and what it means to be an American all situate in a gray area, we learn that the real culprit isn’t the bowling alley owner but his son, a long-time bully of Nora and Jeremy. He is the epitome of the ugly American, someone who’s self-satisfied and – this being the age of Trump – reasserting the privilege of his nativism and racism.

Oh, and Nora – having dumped Jeremy to return to her life as a contemporary composer – returns in the final pages to reconcile with Jeremy. Happy, sort of, ever after.

There are glimpses of skill here, though not enough to make me quite understand how the same author wrote this and The Moor’s Account. This is, ultimately, conventional even as it thoughtfully weaves a Muslim-American perspective into a larger vision of an “other America.” In contrast, The Moor’s Account, committing to one voice and one larger question, asks a similar question in a singular, tragic voice.

still thinking

I thought the insight into the characters was amazing. at first I had a hard time listening and even later had a hard time listening to the narrator for Jeremy. only toward the end did I start to appreciate the weaving of the story and the characters personalities.

Cada voz aporta

Estupenda y HUMANA trama. Cada personaje queda “redondeado y claramente perfilado” por la voz que le da vida. SERÍA UN DESPERDICIO NO AUDIOLEERLO. Gracias Ms Lalami.👏🏼

Perfect story. Great story. Wonderfully written.

I really enjoyed this story. Great characters, great plot, and perfect for this time. With the world fighting each other this is the story for us now. Thank you