The Other Americans

Late one spring night, Driss Guerraoui, a Moroccan immigrant in California, is walking across a darkened intersection when he is killed by a speeding car. 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, a former classmate of Nora´s and now a veteran of the Iraq war; Coleman, a detective who is slowly discovering her son´s secrets; Anderson, a neighbor trying to reconnect with his family; and Driss himself.

As the characters – deeply divided by race, religion and class – tell their stories in The Other Americans, Driss´s family is forced to confront its secrets, a town faces its hypocrisies and love, in all its messy and unpredictable forms, is born.