The Wilkinsons are loving and well intentioned, but Deming is understandably conflicted about his new home. See Lisa Ko discuss “The Leavers” with Neelanjana Banerjee at Vroman’s on Thursday at 7 p.m. Polly, née Peilan, Guo has lost her parental rights on the grounds of abandonment. Deming Guo is 11 years old when he becomes Daniel Wilkinson of Ridgeborough, N.Y., a small town upstate where his new parents, Peter and Kay Wilkinson, teach at a liberal arts college. Ko tells the heartbreaking story of a Chinese mother and her American-born son, who is adopted by a white couple after she disappears without warning and fails to return for several months. Like “Lucky Boy,” Lisa Ko’s debut novel “The Leavers” - winner of the 2016 PEN/Bellwether Prize, a biennial prize established by Barbara Kingsolver for fiction that deals with social justice - is about the fragmentation of a family of vulnerable status. The face of immigration is less white than it once was the fate of immigrants far less secure. Earlier this year, Shanthi Sekaran’s “Lucky Boy” followed a young woman as she went from rural Mexico to Berkeley to a detention center, where she was trapped while her infant son was sent to live with strangers. (It is worth noting that for the most part, these novels are not written by authors whose immigration status would put them in jeopardy.) In last summer’s “Behold the Dreamers,” novelist Imbolo Mbue showed a Cameroonian family fighting for a foothold in New York, hoping for a better life despite their status. These new novels share the anxieties and struggles of the classics - the longing for old country, the search for belonging, the pursuit of the American dream - but it also involves a heightened sense of danger, with the specter of deportation never far from the foreground. As the conversation around immigration has changed, fiction writers have gone to work exploring these dilemmas. Classics like Upton Sinclair’s “The Jungle” and “My Ántonia” by Willa Cather helped define whole eras of our history first- and second-generation authors, including Sandra Cisneros, Amy Tan, Chang-rae Lee, Jhumpa Lahiri and Junot Díaz have given voice to newer immigrant communities, ensuring their inclusion in the landscape of American letters, and by extension, the cultural map of America. The immigrant novel is a staple of American literature - after all, the American immigrant story is as old as the country itself.

The leavers novel