The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz

The novel is an epic story narrated by Yunior de Las Casas, the protagonist of Díaz's first book Drown and chronicles not just the "brief wondrous life of Oscar Wao," an overweight Dominican boy growing up in Paterson, New Jersey and obsessed with science fiction and fantasy novels, with comic books and role-playing games and with falling in love, but also the curse of the "fukú" that has plagued Oscar's family for generations and the Caribbean (and perhaps the entire world) since colonization and slavery.