When I first came to the US from the northeast of Brazil for college, I fell in love with a little cottage on the edge of campus. The house they put me in was supposedly nicer, with a shiny thermostat in each room and an all-white bathroom, but it felt too foreign, too modern, like a hotel with its sharp angles and huge glass doors that opened to wide vistas.
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Though I didn’t grow up in a cedar-shingled house, something about it reminded me of home: the slanted ceiling in the bedrooms, the warm hardwood floors, the small kitchen. I’ve long tried to capture this in writing: the feeling of home, homeyness, familiar comfort.
I open my first novel, Blue Light Hours, with the narrator walking through her new American house for the first time, cataloging what feels ominous and what feels inviting as a way to understand this new transitory and foreign place she finds herself in. Later in the book, she will dream of having a home of her own that feels safe, a place where she can accumulate books, cook her own food, and know she’ll be allowed to stay.
As part of my research, I read many books about architecture and urbanism, from Gaston Bachelard’s Poetics of Space to Witold Rybczynski’s Home: A Short History of an Idea, but it was in immigrant novels and short story collections I found the most insight. They understood that my longing for arched doorways and dormer windows were a symptom of something bigger: a desire for belonging, safety, permanence.
Here are a few of my favorite books about immigrants trying to build homes of their own.
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Jean Rhys, Voyage in the Dark
Anna Morgan’s desire for security and independence takes her through dingy rented rooms and boarding houses all across England in the 1930s, where “the fire was like a painted fire; no warmth came from it.” At only nineteen years old, recently orphaned, terribly missing the West Indies and eager to find a warm place to live, she ends up finding some temporary comfort in older men and new friends who don’t understand her, only to inevitably be abandoned again.
A stunning and moving tragic novel of loneliness, alienation, and longing. Every line here is a revelation.
Jamaica Kincaid, Lucy
Fast forward to 1990, we meet sharp-witted Lucy. The novel opens with the young au pair waking up in New York City, after making the trip from the West Indies, in a nice apartment with tall ceilings, an elevator, and a fridge, luxuries that make it feel as sterile as a container—like “a box in which cargo traveling a long way should be shipped.” “But I was not cargo,” she pushes back right away, and keeps pushing until she can feel like herself again.
A gorgeous and perceptive coming-of-age novel ahead of its time, offering an unflinching look at colonialism, white feminism, and class.
Jhumpa Lahiri, Interpreter of Maladies
Lahiri’s Pulitzer-winning first book has two stories that use houses as conduits for bigger questions of displacement and belonging. In “This Blessed House,” a newlywed Indian couple struggle to adjust to their new Connecticut home, which is filled with strange saint statuettes, snow globes, and Jesus busts in the attic. In “A Temporary Matter,” a grieving Indian-American couple reconnects during scheduled power outages that disrupt their domestic space.
Insightful and sharp, full of pain under the surface.
Ayşegül Savaş, The Anthropologists
How do people live? The novel’s narrator, Asya, seems to wonder as she and her partner try to find a house in an unnamed foreign city. She walks around the different neighborhoods, visits empty houses, lingers in cafés, and tries to meet locals at dinner parties, all the while shooting a documentary about the unassuming neighborhood park near her current apartment and trying to get answers for life’s bigger questions.
The prose is fragmented and mesmerizing, attuned to the rhythms of daily life in this new city. A beautiful and wise novel about finding ways to belong, love one another, and compose a good life away from home.
Sarah Thankam Mathews, All This Could Be Different
This gorgeous and ambitious book follows Sneha, a young immigrant in her first year out of college, as she works a terrible corporate job and deals with housing instability in Milwaukee. Her parents have just been deported to India, she is all alone, she can barely afford food, and her visa is about to expire.
But amidst all the precarity, she finds hope in a thriving queer community with whom she dares to dream of buying a “cloud-pink mansion in need of a painting job,” and maybe finding a way of making a home in the world. A brilliant novel, genuinely hopeful.
Ananda Lima, Craft: Stories I Wrote for the Devil
“Ghost Story,” one of my favorite stories in Lima’s playful fiction debut shows an immigrant living with roommates in New York while her mother builds “a solid concrete house” for her family back home. “I was never comfortable in the wooden houses in the US, precarious and prone to burning,” she writes. “I understood then I’d been craving to live in concrete again.”
A genius metafictional book about American imperialism, immigration, and the devil, among other things.
Bonus: Lima’s poem “Cleaning the Colonial,” from her collection Mother/land, beautifully tackles an immigrant’s complicated love for an old colonial house, with its purely decorative crown molding and golden chandeliers, from a postcolonial perspective.
Jakuta Alikavazovic, Like a Sky Inside (trans. Daniel Levin Becker)
In this unusual immigrant novel, the narrator makes a home for herself at the Louvre Museum, where she sleeps for one night as a researcher, away from her everyday problems and her nine-month-old baby. She’s only able to bring a notebook, a pen, a sweater, some toiletries, and a sleeping bag, though she hides one mystery item that shouldn’t pass through security.
But in this unusual makeshift home, surrounded by paintings and her key possessions, she has room to take stock of her own life. What follows is a lyrical and moving meditation on art, foreignness, belonging, and xenophobia in France from the perspective of a second-generation immigrant, grappling with the complexities of daughterhood and parenthood across borders.
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Blue Light Hours by Bruna Dantas Lobato is available via Black Cat/Grove Atlantic.
