Told by fictional immigrants, the tales of arrival and survival spun by Mukherjee's protagonists often paralyze the reader with their realism. They come from Italy, Trinidad, Israel, Vietnam, Afghanistan, the Philippines and elsewhere to build new lives in such places as Ann Arbor, Atlanta, Manhattan and Miami. For all the troubles the immigrants endure, Mukherjee's portrayal of them as dauntless participants in the American experiment serves to empower them. Even as she's being raped by her employer, Jasmine, a housekeeper from Trinidad, ponders that she has "no nothing other than what she wanted to invent and tell." The Middleman won the 1988 National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction.