9 First-Person Perspectives Give Voice To 'The Other Americans'

Laila Lalami's new novel The Other Americans is told from the perspective of nine different narrators who have one thing in common: They've all "had the experience of dislocation," Lalami says.

The book begins with a Moroccan immigrant who is killed by a speeding driver in a hit and run. The narrators include the dead man himself, his wife, his adult daughter, a man who witnessed the crash, an Iraq war veteran, a detective, and others. The first-person accounts form a mosaic of race and class in America.

"It just seemed to me that it was impossible to capture the complexity of the immigrant experience through just the one perspective of the man who dies at the beginning of the book," Lalami explains. "By conveying it from these different perspectives, my hope was that readers would get different ideas about immigration."