The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao is a novel by the Dominican American writer Junot Diaz, published in 2007. It is set in New Jersey and in the Dominican Republic.

Oscar is the boy at the centre of it: a ghetto nerd who lives with his family, dreams of becoming the next Tolkien, and has no luck at all with the girls he falls for. The family believes it is under a fuku, a curse that has followed them for generations.

The story is told by more than one narrator, and it goes back to the Dominican Republic and to the years of the dictatorship of Rafael Trujillo to explain how the family came to be where it is. It mixes English and Spanish as it goes, and it takes in three generations of the family before it is done.

The novel won the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 2008, and it is one of the books that made a generation of readers notice that American writing was not only in English.