Lalami, Laila

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. Told by multiple narrators; Nora herself, Jeremy (the Iraq war veteran with whom she develops an intimacy), widow Maryam, Efrain (an immigrant witness to the accident who refuses to get involved for fear of deportation), Coleman (the police investigator), and Driss (the dead man himself).

The imagined memoirs of the first black explorer of America--a Moroccan slave whose testimony was left out of the official record of the 1527 conquistador P?nfilo de Narv?ez's expedition to claim the Gulf coast of North America for the Spanish crown and which was faced with peril, navigational errors, disease, and starvation, as well as resistance from indigenous tribes.

Youssef El Mekki, a college student living with his mother in the slums of Casablanca, learns that he is the product of an affair his mother had with a married businessman, and goes in search of his father who takes him in, gives him a job, and sets him on the path to his dreams until a reversal of fortune lands Youssef back in the slums and susceptible to the lure of a fringe group called the Party.

Two men and two women are brought together as they risk their lives to travel across the Strait of Gibraltar in search of a new life in Spain.

Two men and two women are brought together as they risk their lives to travel across the Strait of Gibraltar in search of a new life in Spain.