Best Books About Diaspora and Exile: Essential Fiction

The experience of living between two cultures — of carrying one country inside you while inhabiting another — has produced some of the most important fiction of the past three decades. These novels share a particular analytical advantage: the diaspora writer sees the cultures they inhabit from the outside, with a precision unavailable to those entirely embedded within them. They are the most reliable guides to what any culture looks like from a position of partial belonging.

The Essential List

Americanah — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (2013)

The most analytically precise contemporary novel about race, identity, and the diaspora experience. Ifemelu’s journey from Lagos to Philadelphia to London and back to Lagos is structured around her discovery that racial categories are not universal but American-specific — that she was not ‘Black’ in Nigeria, only in America, where Blackness carries the weight of a specific history she didn’t live but inherits on arrival. Adichie’s observations, filtered through Ifemelu’s blog posts about ‘Race in America for Non-American Blacks,’ are simultaneously funny, uncomfortable, and rigorously honest. The novel is also a love story — the relationship with Obinze spans continents and decades — and one of the great recent novels about what it means to go home when home has changed.

White Teeth — Zadie Smith (2000)

The defining British novel about immigration and multiculturalism. Archie Jones (English) and Samad Iqbal (Bangladeshi) — friends since the Second World War — live as neighbours in Willesden, North London, their families intertwined over two generations. Smith’s comedy of cultural collision and historical irony is both exuberant and serious: the novel argues that the cultural and historical baggage that immigrant communities carry with them cannot be left at the border, and that the children of immigrants — who grew up in Britain but carry the expectations of another country — navigate a particularly complicated form of double belonging. The most joyful of the novels listed here.

The Namesake — Jhumpa Lahiri (2003)

The quietest and most emotionally affecting of the novels listed here. Lahiri’s portrait of the Ganguli family — Bengali immigrants in Boston, and their American-born son Gogol — is a study of the transmission of cultural identity across generations and the distance between the India that Ashoke and Ashima carry inside them and the America that Gogol inhabits. The novel’s central image — the name Gogol, which the son rejects as he asserts his American identity and later reclaims as he mourns his father — carries the entire weight of the immigrant experience: the inheritance that children reject, and only later understand.

The Kite Runner — Khaled Hosseini (2003)

Hosseini’s first novel, set in Afghanistan and California, is the most widely read novel about the Afghan diaspora — and about the specific guilt of departure: leaving a country and its people to a fate you escaped. Amir’s betrayal of Hassan as a boy, and his attempt at redemption decades later from California, is structured as a personal moral narrative; but the destruction of Afghanistan that provides the backdrop (the Soviet invasion, the Taliban, the civil war) is always present, the context that makes Amir’s individual failure part of a larger catastrophe.

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao — Junot Díaz (2007)

The most formally innovative of the diaspora novels. The story of Oscar de León — an overweight, nerdy Dominican-American fantasy-fiction obsessive growing up in New Jersey — is narrated by Yunior, his college roommate, in a prose style that mixes English and Spanish, footnotes about Dominican history, and references to science fiction and superhero mythology. Díaz uses Oscar’s story to tell the history of the Dominican Republic under Trujillo and its long shadow over the diaspora community. The novel won the Pulitzer Prize; it is the most fully realised account of the Dominican-American experience available.

The Sympathizer — Viet Thanh Nguyen (2015)

The most politically demanding of the novels listed here. The unnamed narrator — a communist spy passing as a South Vietnamese Army officer — is simultaneously a study in double consciousness (believing in the revolution while living within the system it opposes) and a critique of American cultural power in Vietnam. Nguyen’s account of the Hollywood version of the Vietnam War — in which Vietnamese people appear only as backdrop for American psychology — is devastating. The novel’s comic tone and philosophical depth make it the most intellectually ambitious diaspora novel of its decade.

The Common Thread

The novels listed here share a preoccupation with what cannot be left behind: the history, the language, the expectations, the guilt, the love for a country that is no longer fully accessible. They are also studies in double vision — the capacity of the person who belongs partially to two worlds to see both more clearly than those who belong entirely to one. This analytical advantage is the gift that diaspora literature consistently offers its readers.