Notes: The classic coming of age story of a Puerto Rican teenager who struggles with poverty, adolescence, and alienation in New York where her language and heritage make her an outsider.

Notes: This romantic, rich, and exotic novel captures the vital Arab-American community in Los Angeles through the eyes of an Iraqi-American immigrant family.

Notes: The central character of Edwidge Danticat's newest novel was a brutal torturer in his native Haiti whose new life as a loving family man and kind landlord in America hides his horrific past.

Also available on audiocassette and compact disc.

Notes: Pulitzer Prize winning author Hijuelos has written a rich saga of a large Irish-Cuban immigrant family set in a small Pennsylvania town.

Notes: Tan's poignant novel captures the lives of four Chinese women and their American daughters and offers readers universal stories about mother - daughter relationships.

Notes: Gogol Ganguli, son of an Indian academic and his homesick wife, feels as out of place as his name - a pet name that becomes permanent when the letter bearing his formal name is lost between India and America.

Notes: This is the latest of Trigiani's warm, family novels set in an Italian immigrant community in rural Pennsylvania.

Also available on compact disc.

Notes: Speaking fewer than 100 English words when he entered Catholic school in Sacramento, Rodriguez became a model student and writer whose life took him far from the Mexican-American community.

Notes: "One of the few genuinely distinguished novels written by a twentieth-century American. The central figure is David Schearl, an overwrought, phobic, and dangerously imaginative little boy. He has come to New York with his East European Jewish parents, and now, in the years between 1911 and 1913, he is exposed, shock by shock, to the blows of slum life."--Irving Howe, The New York Times Book Review