Generations of people across the globe have left their home countries in search of a better life. Through fiction and nonfiction, we get a glimpse of their experience. Dive into these nine audiobooks for young adults and adults.
In this chronicle of contemporary immigration, journalist Lauren Markham follows the seventeen-year-old Flores twins as they make their harrowing journey across the Rio Grande and the Texas desert, into the hands of immigration authorities, and from there to their estranged older brother’s custody in Oakland, California.
Listen to an excerpt The Far Away Brothers
Told in alternating teen voices across three generations, this story weaves the threads of a family growing into an American identity.
Listen to an excerpt You Bring the Distant Near
An Iranian girl escapes to America as a child, but her father stays behind. Over twenty years, as she evolves from confused immigrant to overachieving Westerner, she sees her father four times, each time in a different city.
Listen to an excerpt Refuge
From master storyteller An Na comes the Printz Award–winning novel about a Korean girl who tells her firsthand account of trying to find her place and identity in America, from the day she leaves Korea as a child to her rocky journey through the teenage years.
Listen to an excerpt A Step from Heaven
The Guardian’s first-ever migration correspondent, Patrick Kingsley, has traveled through seventeen countries to put an indelible face on today’s overwhelming refugee disaster.
Listen to an excerpt The New Odyssey
A compulsively readable debut novel about marriage, immigration, class, race, and the trapdoors in the American Dream, this is the unforgettable story of a young Cameroonian couple making a new life in New York just as the Great Recession upends the economy.
Listen to an excerpt Behold the Dreamers
The Namesake follows the Ganguli family through three decades, from Calcutta to Cambridge to the Boston suburbs.
Listen to an excerpt The Namesake
Two stories of the journey from Ireland to America, told by Nory and by her neighbor and friend, Sean Red Mallon. Both are headed for the same destination, the home of Nory’s sister Maggie, at 416 Smith Street, Brooklyn, America.
Listen to an excerpt Maggie’s Door
For more audiobooks about immigrants and refugees, see our collection.