Oprah Winfrey has chosen Imbolo Mbue's Behold the Dreamers as the latest Oprah's Book Club Pick. The debut novel tells the story of two fathers--a working-class immigrant from Cameroon who is hired as a chauffeur by a top Lehman Brothers executive in the fall of 2007, just before the financial crisis--and how their families become inextricably linked.
Winfrey said that Behold the Dreamer is "about race and class, the economy, culture, immigration and the danger of the Us vs. Them mentality. And underneath it all comes the heart and soul of family love, the pursuit of happiness and what home really means."
A native of Limbe, Cameroon, Mbue has been a U.S. resident for more than a decade and lives in New York City. Behold the Dreamers won the 2017 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction and was named by the New York Times and Washington Post as one of their Notable Books of 2016.
"Fifteen years ago, I walked into a public library and borrowed my first Oprah's Book Club selection--Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon--and was so inspired by it that I began writing without thinking much of where my writing would lead me, never quite imagining that it would someday lead to this humbling privilege," Mbue said.