THE OTHER AMERICANS

301pp., paperback, Bloomsbury Publishing, London, 2020

ISBN: 9781526606716

Winner of the Arab American Book Award in Fiction.

The novel uses different perspectives to explore the repercussions of a Moroccan man's death in a hit-and-run - at once a family saga, a murder mystery, a love story, and a reflection on the immigrant experience in America.

"It matters desperately ... 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

“This deftly constructed account of a crime and its consequences shows up, in its quiet way, the pressures under which ordinary Americans of Muslim background have labored since the events of 9/11.” J.M. Coetzee, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature

Laila Lalami was born in Rabat and educated in Morocco, Great Britain, and the United States. She is the author of the novels Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits, Secret Son and The Moor's Account, winner of the American Book Award, the Arab American Book Award, and the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award). Her essays and opinion pieces have appeared in the Washington Post, the Guardian, the New York Times, and in many anthologies. She writes the "Between the Lines" column for The Nation magazine and is a critic-at-large for the Los Angeles Times. The recipient of a British Council Fellowship, a Fulbright Fellowship, and a Guggenheim Fellowship, she is currently Professor of Creative Writing at the University of California at Riverside.  She lives in Los Angeles.