There was a point in this novel that truly got me though. There were many, many points in this book at which I could feel so palpably my disappointment with this world, and many in which I was reminded of the every day, often overlooked kindness it is for someone to choose to allow their preconceptions about others to shift - maybe not 180 degrees, but a little bit, every day. 'Growing up in this town, I had long ago learned that the savagery of a man named Mohammed was rarely questioned, but his humanity always had to be proven.' The tessellated structure of The Other Americans means that the narrative sometimes loses focus, and the emerging love story is not altogether convincing but the multiple viewpoints give it the breadth of a family saga with the suspense of a mystery and, finally, the satisfying resolution of a thriller. Some, though, are immensely strong, and Lalami has used them to fashion a moving and exceptionally rich portrait of a modern American community, one that is much more far-reaching than just a saga of immigration. Some characters are not well rounded and at times the medley can feel as if Lalami is too consciously striving to include every type of outsider voice.

The novel is told from multiple viewpoints: Nora, Driss’s composer daughter Jeremy Gorecki, an Iraq veteran and Nora’s former classmate Erica Coleman, the newly arrived police detective investigating the killing Anderson Baker, a bowling alley proprietor who owns the property adjacent to the family’s diner the widowed Maryam Guerraoui and even the deceased Driss himself. She is settled on an ambitious structure to tell the many stories in The Other Americans, shifting between nine narrators. Laila Lalami’s sensitive fourth book of fiction is in part an investigative thriller, but its main concern is to explore the ripples that local Moroccan business owner and father Driss’s death sends out through Yucca Valley, a small town in the Mojave desert, California.

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