The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz

Ignore the scurrilous language and the burden of tiny-print footnotes and you can't help being drawn in by this novel about a family with one foot in the Dominican Republic and one in New Jersey. Oscar is a normal but enormously unattractive guy who is often hopelessly in love and in the end gives up his life to it. In the background there are stories of the horrors endured by the Dominican Republic during the Trujillo years. The footnotes that look so daunting at first are actually amusing bits of historic scuttlebutt and the story is all the more vivid for the casual attitude and language of the author.