The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

The Dominican half of a story that runs between New Jersey and the island. Díaz sets the family's fortunes against the long shadow of the Trujillo dictatorship: the walled Zona Colonial, the seafront Malecón, a quiet capital neighbourhood, the cane fields inland where the family curse turns violent, and Baní to the west, where the line begins. The map anchors on Santo Domingo; Oscar's Paterson sits outside it, to the north.

Oscar de León

Oscar's Paterson, New Jersey

Ghetto Nerd

The overweight, comics-and-genre-obsessed teenager at the centre of the book grows up in the Dominican diaspora of Paterson, a working New Jersey city with a large island community. It is the northern pole of a story that keeps pulling south, back toward the family's Dominican past.

Opening section, GhettoNerd at the End of the World

explicit Díaz names Paterson as the family's American home; the novel gives no single address, so this marks the city centre. Flagged as outside the setting because the book is anchored on Santo Domingo.

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