Concepcion: An Immigrant Family's Fortunes

In this finalist for a 2021 National Book Critics Circle award, Samaha skillfully blends together multiple storylines into an engrossing narrative: his formative years in America; his mother’s journey to America; tracing his family’s ancestors in the Philippines to an era prior to Spanish rule; the effects of Spanish, and later, American colonialism on his ancestors and the Philippines as a nation; and an examination of the American Dream.