Imbolo Mbue has won the 2017 PEN/Faulkner Fiction Award for her debut novel, “Behold the Dreamers,” about an immigrant desperate to become a U.S. citizen.

The $15,000 award, announced Tuesday by PEN/Faulkner Foundation chair Susan Richards Shreve, is “America’s largest peer-juried prize for fiction.” 

“Behold the Dreamers” (Random House) is a strikingly timely story about Jende Jonga, a man from Cameroon who hopes to settle his family permanently in the United States. In the opening pages, a Lehman Brothers executive in New York hires Jende to be his chauffeur. Their relationship allows the novel to follow the trajectories of two very different families at opposite ends of America’s economic ladder when the Great Recession hits.

Jende’s tale is informed, in some ways, by Mbue’s life. After a childhood of extreme poverty in Cameroon, relatives sponsored her to come to the United States in 1998. She went to college and graduate school and eventually settled in New York; she became a U.S. citizen in 2014. Her novel reportedly sold to Random House for at least $1 million. She knows both the immigrant’s boundless optimism and America’s conflicted attitude toward foreigners. 

“I am an example of what America offers to immigrants,” Mbue said in an interview with The Washington Post last summer. “We come here just in awe of this country — in awe — and wanting to be a part of it.” 

Mbue is to receive her award at a ceremony May 6 at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington. The finalists will receive $5,000 each. They are:

●Viet Dinh, “After Disasters” (Little A).

●Louise Erdrich, “LaRose” (Harper). 

●Garth Greenwell, “What Belongs to You” (FSG).

●Sunil Yapa, “Your Heart Is a Muscle the Size of a Fist” (Lee Boudreaux).

Chris Abani, Chantel Acevedo and Sigrid Nunez served as this year’s PEN/Faulkner judges. They considered about 500 novels and story collections by American authors published during 2016.

Tickets to the award ceremony, which include dinner and an opportunity to meet the authors, are $100 and can be purchased at folger.edu or by calling 202-544-7077.

Ron Charles is the editor of Book World.