Laila Lalami’s new novel is forthcoming on 26 March 2019 from Pantheon, an imprint of Penguin Random House. The 320-page The Other Americans traces the death of a Moroccan immigrant in the US whose demise brings together a range of characters “deeply divide by race, religion, and class.”

Here is a description from its publishers.

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.

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. 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.

As 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.

Laila Lalami. Image from Alchetron.

The Other Americans has received praise from J.M. Coetzee (“This deftly constructed account of a crime and its consequences shows up, in its quiet way, the pressures under which ordinary Americans of Muslim background have labored since the events of 9/11”) and Viet Thanh Nguyen, author of The Sympathizer (“A writer of uncommon conviction and tremendous insight”), as well as a coveted starred review from Kirkus hailing her “thrilling command of her narrative gifts,” and how “nuanced characters drive this novel.”

Born in Rabat and educated in Morocco, Great Britain, and in the US, Lalami is the author of the novels Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits, which was a finalist for the Oregon Book Award; Secret Son, which was on the Orange Prize longlist; and The Moor’s Account, which won the American Book Award, the Arab American Book Award, and the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and longlisted for the Man Booker Prize. A critic-at-large for the Los Angeles Times, Lalami is the recipient of a British Council Fellowship, a Fulbright Fellowship, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. She is currently a professor of creative writing at the University of California at Riverside.

Pre-order The Other Americans on IndieBound and Amazon.