Laila Lalami

Nora Guerraoui, a jazz composer, returns home to a small town in the Mojave after hearing that her father, owner of a popular restaurant there, has been killed in a suspicious hit-and-run car accident. Nora develops an intimacy with Jeremy, an Iraq war veteran. Along with the widow Maryam; Efrain, an immigrant witness to the accident; Coleman, the police investigator, and Driss--the dead man himself-- Nora explores secrets and hypocrisies in a society riven by race, class, and religion. -- adapted from jacket

The Other Americans

The author uses her journey from Moroccan immigrant to U.S. citizen as a starting point for an exploration of the rights, liberties, and protections that are traditionally associated with American citizenship. Tapping into history, politics, and literature, she elucidates how accidents of birth - such as national origin, race, or gender - that once determined the boundaries of Americanness still cast their shadows today

On Belonging in America

Conditional Citizens

Brings us the imagined memoirs of the first black explorer of America--a Moroccan slave whose testimony was left out of the official record. In 1527, the conquistador Pánfilo de Narváez sailed from the port of Sanlúcar de Barrameda with a crew of six hundred men and nearly a hundred horses. His goal was to claim what is now the Gulf Coast of the United States for the Spanish crown and, in the process, become as wealthy and famous as Hernán Cortés. But from the moment the Narváez expedition landed in Florida, it faced peril--navigational errors, disease, starvation, as well as resistance from indigenous tribes. Within a year there were only four survivors: the expedition's treasurer, Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca; a Spanish nobleman named Alonso del Castillo Maldonado; a young explorer named Andrés Dorantes de Carranza; and Dorantes's Moroccan slave, Mustafa al-Zamori, whom the three Spaniards called Estebanico. These four survivors would go on to make a journey across America that would transform them from proud conquis-tadores to humble servants, from fearful outcasts to faith healers.

a novel

The Moor's account

A Novel

The Dream Hotel

Set in modern-day Morocco, the story of four vastly different Moroccans who illegally cross the Strait of Gibraltar in an inflatable boat headed for Spain chronicles the circumstances that drive them to risk their lives and the rewards that may or may not prove to be worth the danger.

Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits

Follows Youssef El Mekki's journey from a childhood in poverty with his mother on the streets of Casablanca to a life of luxury with his father and back again.

Secret Son

NATIONAL BESTSELLER ● READ WITH JENNA BOOK CLUB PICK AS FEATURED ON TODAY ● From Laila Lalami—the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award finalist and a “maestra of literary fiction” (NPR)—comes a riveting and utterly original novel about one woman’s fight for freedom, set in a near future where even dreams are under surveillance. Sara has just landed at LAX, returning home from a conference abroad, when agents from the Risk Assessment Administration pull her aside and inform her that she will soon commit a crime. Using data from her dreams, the RAA’s algorithm has determined that she is at imminent risk of harming the person she loves most: her husband. For his safety, she must be kept under observation for twenty-one days. The agents transfer Sara to a retention center, where she is held with other dreamers, all of them women trying to prove their innocence from different crimes. With every deviation from the strict and ever-shifting rules of the facility, their stay is extended. Months pass and Sara seems no closer to release. Then one day, a new resident arrives, disrupting the order of the facility and leading Sara on a collision course with the very companies that have deprived her of her freedom. Eerie, urgent, and ceaselessly clear-eyed, The Dream Hotel artfully explores the seductive nature of technology, which puts us in shackles even as it makes our lives easier. Lalami asks how much of ourselves must remain private if we are to remain free, and whether even the most invasive forms of surveillance can ever capture who we really are.

The Dream Hotel: A Read with Jenna Pick

Een familiesaga, whodunnit en liefdesgeschiedenis in één, die op subtiele wijze de problemen van de westerse maatschappij blootlegt. Finalist National Book Award, Kirkus Prize en Aspen Literary Award. LA Times bestseller en beste boek van het jaar volgens onder meer TIME, Washington Post, The Guardian, Kirkus Reviews Driss Guerraoui en zijn vrouw zijn in de jaren tachtig van Casablanca naar Californië geëmigreerd om daar een beter leven op te bouwen. Wanneer Driss op een late lenteavond een donkere kruising oversteekt in zijn woonplaats, een klein stadje in de Mojavewoestijn, wordt hij geschept door een voorbijrazende auto. Het lijkt een bewuste hit & run. Driss' volwassen dochter Nora keert terug naar haar familie om die bij te staan. Ze raakt betrokken bij het politieonderzoek en wordt geconfronteerd met geheimen binnen het gezin en met de hypocrisie van de gemeenschap. De zaak aan Highway 62 is een actuele, provocerende en aangrijpende roman over de immigrant als 'de ander'.

Laila Lalami

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