In 2019, immigration novels are especially timely

NEW YORK (AP) — Novels about immigrants, like immigration itself, are a long and central part of American culture.

In 2019, books conceived before Donald Trump’s rise arrive with a special timeliness as the president, who launched his campaign by calling Mexican immigrants “rapists,” shut down the federal government closed over his insistence on funding for a wall along the country’s southern border.

New novels include Valeria Luiselli’s “Lost Children Archive,” which tells of young immigrants separated from their families, and Nicole Dennis-Benn’s “Patsy,” about a Jamaican woman’s discovery that the U.S. is nothing like what she had imagined.