Description

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, and the Jon Sargent, Sr. First Novel Prize, this unforgettable novel was also named Time Magazine’s number one fiction book of the year. Recognized as one of The New York Times’s 100 Best Books of the 21st Century, it was celebrated as one of the best books of 2007 by The New York Times, San Francisco Chronicle, New York Magazine, Entertainment Weekly, The Boston Globe, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, People, The Village Voice, Time Out New York, Salon, Baltimore City Paper, The Christian Science Monitor, Booklist, Library Journal, Publishers Weekly, and the New York Public Library, among others. It was also nominated as one of America’s most beloved novels by PBS’s The Great American Read and selected by The Atlantic as one of the greatest American novels of the past 100 years.

Oscar is an awkward, endearingly sweet, but chronically overweight nerd who lives in New Jersey with his strict, old-fashioned mother and his fiercely independent sister. He dreams of becoming the Dominican J.R.R. Tolkien and, above all else, of finding love. But life has never made things easy for Oscar. His family has been plagued for generations by the fukú, a curse that has followed them from Santo Domingo to the United States, shadowing their every step. Spanning decades and continents, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao offers a powerful look at Dominican-American history and presents a bold, eye-opening portrayal of the modern American experience. At its heart, it is a story of resilience, the unbreakable spirit of a family, and the risks we take—all for love.