“Had he suffered? Had he called out for help?” The unspoken, hanging words are sharp, wounding.

But the more Nora tries, the further her hopes sink, as inexorably as if they are weighted with stones. The pain of it is goading her to seek answers, and it was a tether that held her to the small Mojave Desert town. The hit-and-run killing of Driss Guerraoui echoed through his daughter’s mind with the vitality of a heartbeat. “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 repercussions of his death bring together a diverse cast of characters: Guerraoui's daughter Nora, a jazz composer who returns to the small town in the Mojave she thought she'd left for good his widow, Maryam, who still pines after her life in the old country Efraín, an undocumented witness whose fear of deportation prevents him from coming forward Jeremy, an old friend of Nora's and an Iraq War veteran Coleman, a detective who is slowly discovering her son's secrets Anderson, a neighbor trying to reconnect with his family and the murdered man himself.Īs the characters-deeply divided by race, religion, and class-tell their stories, connections among them emerge, even as Driss's family confronts its secrets, a town faces its hypocrisies, and love, messy and unpredictable, is born.

Late one spring night, Driss Guerraoui, a Moroccan immigrant living in California, is walking across a darkened intersection when he is killed by a speeding car. From the Pulitzer Prize finalist and author of The Moor's Account, here is a timely and powerful novel about the suspicious death of a Moroccan immigrant-at once a family saga, a murder mystery, and a love story, informed by the treacherous fault lines of American culture.

The other americans book