The Other Americans

by Laila Lalami

The desert was home, however much I had tried to run away from it. Home was wide-open spaces, pristine light, silence that wasn’t quite silence. Home, above all, was the family who loved me. Only now, after my father’s death, did I come to understand that love was not a tame or passive creature, but a rebellious beast, messy and unpredictable, capacious and forgiving, and that it would deliver me from grief and carry me out of the darkness.

Nora tries to solve the contradictions posed by the people in her life. Friends who don't come when her father dies, her beloved father (the "good" parent) who was an adulterer, her mother who makes her daghters miserable the more she loves her family, her own affair with a lover who is married. Only until she can accept that the world is not black and white, is she able to forgive and start a new.