2012: The Submission, by Amy Waldman
(Picador Press, 2012)
"The Submission" opens with a Manhattan jury's charge to choose a memorial for the victims of the 9/11 terrorist attack. Through a blind admissions process, the jury is torn between two design finalists but eventually decides on the Garden, a four-square geometric design with a pavilion. When the jury learns that the plan they selected was drafted by a young Muslim American architect, Mohammad Khan, they know that their selection will unleash a firestorm of controversy and they are proven right.
The novel focuses on two central characters, Claire Burwell, the wife of a victim and a memorial juror who fought for the selection of the Garden, and Mohammad Khan, the stubborn, inscrutable architect who defends his design and his right, as an American, to enter and win the project. A well-drawn cast of secondary characters add their voices to create an atmosphere of urgency and controversy.
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2011: Little Bee, by Chris Cleave
(Simon & Schuster, 2009)
"Little Bee" tells a story of two intertwined lives and the hidden world of refugees. Little Bee, a young Nigerian, is released from a British immigration detention center where she has been held under horrific conditions for two years. She seeks out the only English person she knows: Sarah, a posh young mother and magazine editor. Eventually, what happened on a beach in Nigeria, when the two first met, is revealed. Their brief encounter, a traumatic event, has haunted each woman ever since.
Narrated alternately by Little Bee and Sarah, the novel also features Sarah's young son, Charlie, who refuses to take off his Batman costume and whose "goodies/baddies" worldview leavens an otherwise dark story.
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2010: Secret Son, a novel by author Laila Lalami (Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 2009)
"Secret Son" tells the story of a young man who grows up in the slums of Casablanca with his mother, believing that his long deceased father was a poor, respected schoolteacher. Early on in the novel, Youssef El Mekki discovers that his father is in fact alive, a wealthy businessman living in the same city. Youssef sets out to find Nabil and for a time enters his father's sophisticated world.
The novel chronicles Youssef's rise in society, from the slums of Casablanca to a penthouse apartment. Set in modern Morocco, against a background of Islamic fundamentalism and corrupt liberalism, "Secret Son" looks at the struggle for identity, the need for love and family, the factors that can turn disaffected youth to religious extremism, and the desperation that grips ordinary lives in a world divided by class, politics, and religion.
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2009: My Jim, by Seattle author Nancy Rawles (Three Rivers Press, 2005)
Nancy Rawles's powerful, moving novel is a harrowing account of slavery and a testament to the power of love and longing for freedom, survival of families and tradition. In "My Jim," the author re-imagines Mark Twain's "Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" from the slave's perspective. The story follows Jim's family as they struggle to cope with his loss after his escape down the Mississippi.
"My Jim" is told in the voice of Sadie, the wife of Huck's enslaved traveling companion. The novel recasts Jim as more than a runaway drifting down the Mississippi River with a delinquent youth, more than the gullible victim and moral father figure to Huck in Twain's work. In telling the familiar tale from a different perspective, Rawles considers the shattered families of many slaves.
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2008: The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears, a debut novel by Dinaw Mengestu (Riverhead Books, 2007).
Set in a poor neighborhood in Washington, D.C., "The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears" tells a story of the African immigrant experience through three main characters: narrator Sepha Stephanos, an Ethiopian immigrant, who runs a small corner grocery store, and his friends, Joseph, from the Congo, and Kenneth, from Kenya. All share nostalgia for their home countries; none has come close to achieving the American dream. When a white academic and her biracial daughter move into the neighborhood and befriend Sepha, tensions build and it becomes clear they are not welcome in the gentrifying neighborhood.
The novel explores themes of race and class relations, what it means to lose family and a country, what it takes to create a new home, what it means to be an immigrant in America. The book's title comes from Dante's "Inferno," where the poet is about to leave hell, on his way to purgatory, and catches a glimpse of the stars.
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2007: The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri (Mariner Books, 2004)
"The Namesake" is Jhumpa Lahiri's first novel, following her Pulitzer Prize-winning story collection, "Interpreter of Maladies." It takes the Ganguli family from their tradition-bound life in Calcutta through their fraught transformation into Americans. On the heels of an arranged marriage, Ashoke and Ashima Ganguli settle in Cambridge, Mass., where Ashoke does his best to adapt while his wife pines for home. When their son, Gogol, is born, the task of naming him betrays the vexed results of bringing old ways to the new world.
Named for a Russian writer and left with his pet name rather than a proper Bengali first name, Gogol Ganguli knows only that he suffers the burden of his heritage as well as his odd, antic name. He stumbles along the second generation path, strewn with conflicting loyalties, comic detours, and wrenching love affairs.
- From the publisher
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2006: Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi (Pantheon Books, 2003)
"Persepolis" is Marjane Satrapi's wise, funny, and heartbreaking memoir of growing up in Iran during the Islamic Revolution. In powerful black-and-white comic strip images, Satrapi tells the story of her childhood in Tehran from age 6 to 14. These years saw the overthrow of the Shah's regime, the triumph of the Islamic Revolution, and the devastating effects of war with Iraq. The intelligent, outspoken only child of committed Marxists and the great-granddaughter of one of Iran's last emperors, Marjane bears witness to a childhood uniquely entwined with the history of her country. "Persepolis" paints an unforgettable portrait of daily life in Iran: of the bewildering contradictions between home and public life and of the enormous toll repressive regimes exact on the individual spirit.
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2005: When the Emperor Was Divine by Julie Otsuka (Anchor Books, 2003)
"When the Emperor Was Divine" is the story of an unnamed Japanese American family's internment during World War II. Shifting narrative points of view with each chapter, from the mother to the 11-year-old girl, to the 8-year-old boy, Otsuka portrays the devastation, dehumanization, and hardships of the camp experience. The fourth chapter looks back on the family's return to their ransacked home. In a heartbreaking reunion, the father returns home, and in the final chapter, titled "Confession," expresses his anger against those who imprisoned him.
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2004: Seattle Reads Isabel Allende
- My Invented Country: A Nostalgic Journey Through Chile (HarperCollins, 2003)
- City of the Beasts (HarperCollins, 2002)
- Paula (HarperCollins, 1995)
- The Infinite Plan (HarperCollins, 1993)
- The Stories of Eva Luna (Atheneum, 1991)
- Eva Luna (Knopf, 1988)
- The House of the Spirits (Knopf, 1985)
- End of list
Note: The 2004 series featured seven titles from Allende's body of work.
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2003: A Gesture Life by Chang-rae Lee (Riverhead Books, 1999)
"A Gesture Life" tells the story of Franklin (Doc) Hata, recently retired owner of a medical supply store in Bedley Run, a wealthy suburb of New York where Hata came to live after World War II. Although Hata is well respected in the community, his life is subtly infused with a melancholy alienation from the world and from his own feelings. As the novel unfolds, we learn more about his past, both his time in the Japanese military during World War II, during which he witnessed many horrors, and his more recent estrangement from his adopted daughter Sunny.
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2002: Wild Life by Molly Gloss (Mariner Books, 2001)
Set in southwest Washington State in the early 1900s, "Wild Life" is the story of Charlotte Bridger Drummond, a single mother who supports her five irrepressible sons by writing popular women's adventure tales. When a young girl goes missing from a logging camp near Mount St. Helens, Charlotte joins in the search for her - setting off unknowingly on an adventure both like and unlike any that she had ever imagined in her own fiction.
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2001: Fooling With Words: A Celebration of Poets and Their Craft by Bill Moyers (William Morrow, 1999)
In featuring poetry in the third year of the project, the challenge was to find a way to open the world of poetry to people who thought they didn't like or understand it, or for whatever reason, didn't read poetry. The book chosen was "Fooling with Words," a collection of interviews Bill Moyers did with 11 poets at the 1998 Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival.
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1999: A Lesson Before Dying by Ernest Gaines (Random House, 1993; paperback by Vintage Books, 1997)
Set in a small Louisiana community in the 1940s, "A Lesson Before Dying" tells the story of Jefferson, a young black man condemned to die for a murder he didn't commit, and the teacher Grant Wiggins, who is sent to teach Jefferson how to die with dignity.
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1998: The Sweet Hereafter by Russell Banks (HarperCollins, 1991)
"The Sweet Hereafter" tells the story of an accident on a snowy road, the resulting deaths of a town's children, and the varied ways the survivors cope with issues of acceptance and blame. Four narrators - Dolores, the bus driver; widower Billy Ansell, who loses his two children; lawyer Mitchell Stephens; and Nichole, a teenage girl who survives the crash but is in a wheelchair - tell the story.
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