Newly arrived from Ghana with his mother and older sister, eleven-year-old Harrison Opoku lives on the ninth floor of a block of flats on a London housing estate. The second best runner in the whole of Year 7, Harri races through his new life in his personalised trainers -- the Adidas stripes drawn on with marker pen -- blissfully unaware of the very real threat all around him. With equal fascination for the local gang -- the Dell Farm Crew -- and...

Seventy-year-old patriarch Big Angel de la Cruz is dying, and he wants to have one last birthday blowout. Unfortunately, his 100-year-old mother, America, dies the week of his party, so funeral and birthday are celebrated one day apart. The entire contentious, riotous de la Cruz clan descends on San Diego for the events--"High rollers and college students, prison veternaos and welfare mothers, happy kids and sad old-timers and pinches gringos and...

"In the spirit of a dream, many immigrants of color set out across continents, oceans, and borders, travelling to the United States in pursuit of opportunity. Celebratory, triumphant, and inspiring, In the Spirit of a Dream is a tribute to thirteen immigrant stories, from world-famous trailblazers to local heroes. You will read about astronaut Anousheh Ansari; Paralympic athlete Alejandro Albor; surgeon Ayub Khan Ommaya; jazz musician Candido Camero;...

Excitedly joining her family for an outdoor camping trip in a Midwestern state park, Fatima Khazi helps set up a tent, build a fire, and fend off a daddy longlegs before settling down to sleep surrounded by the near-magical sounds of the forest.

"From the outside, the Chengs seem like poster children for the enduring promise of the American Dream. Once Patty landed a tech job near Dallas, she and Liang grew secure enough to have a second child, and to send for their first from his grandparents back in China. Isn't this what they sacrificed so much for, to be a family? But then little Annabel begins to sleepwalk at night, putting in motion a string of misunderstandings that strips away their...

In this account of two decades in the life of an immigrant household, the fall of communism and the rise of globalization are artfully reflected in the experience of a single family. Ironies, subtle and glaring, are revealed: the Nasmertovs left Odessa for Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, with a huge sense of finality, only to find that the divide between the old world and the new is not nearly as clear-cut as they thought. The dissolution of the Soviet...