In Garcia's first novel, Dreaming in Cuban, three generations of a Cuban-American family are divided over their conflicting feelings about everything from the Cuban revolution and Fidel Castro to their new life in Brooklyn.

Like Garcia, Julia Alvarez is concerned with how families are bound together in their adopted culture and what divides them as they look back on their lives in their birth countries. In How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents, four young sisters leave the Dominican Republic with their parents and are sent to prep school before forging new-world lives.

Gabriel García Márquez's classic One Hundred Years of Solitude is a family history in which the most fantastic wonders happen alongside far more ordinary events in the fictional village of Macondo. A master of magical realism, Márquez tells of an entire...