Julia Alvarez’s latest novel explores notions of cultural assimilation, providing readers with an enriching immigrant narrative Through her novels, essays and poetry collections, Dominican-American author Julia Alvarez has depicted the immigrant identity as a complex mesh that is informed by social class, gender and ethnicity. Her 1991 novel How the Garcia Girls Lost their Accents documents the agonising difficulties faced by four Dominican sisters who settle in the US after fleeing El Jefe’s dictatorship. Afterlife, Alvarez’s first novel for adults in fifteen years, carries echoes from her earlier novel and builds on notions of cultural assimilation and the fragmentation of personal identity. However, Alvarez’s latest offering mines a different vein of truth about these themes. Set against the backdrop of a distressing post-truth world,