Digging to America is a story set in Baltimore, Maryland about two very different families’ experiences with adoption and their relationships with each other.

The story continues to progress through the early childhood of Jin-Ho and Susan, displaying the differences in how they are raised and the impact it has on them as they grow older.

At times, the relationship between the two families is strained because of their contrasting opinions, but they remain good friends throughout the entire story.

She keeps in touch with her Iranian relatives, but manages to live an extravagant and exciting life that Maryam throws herself into once a year.

Belonging Michiko Kakutani in her New York Times book review: "In Ms. Tyler's new novel, Digging to America, belonging is a question not only of family but of being an American too: whether an immigrant can ever feel completely at home in the States, or whether he or she will always feel like an outsider; whether identity is a matter of will and choice or inherited culture and history...Ms. Tyler...delineates Maryam's efforts to come to terms with her new life in America with sympathy and wit, carefully tracking Maryam's ambivalent feelings toward Americans: the indignation she feels when condescending strangers praise her for having "an excellent vocabulary"; her impatience with trendy, multicultural liberals who willfully try to adopt foreigners' foods and traditions; and her anger at her son Sami when he mocks Americans for being self-absorbed, self-righteous and so instantaneously chummy.

Kakutani again: "Bitsy is... big-hearted but bossy, well-meaning but self-righteous,[and] insists on getting Jin-Ho a traditional Korean outfit, preaches the virtues of cloth diapers and the dangers of soft drinks, and burbles on about Maryam's Iranian recipes while criticizing the Yazdans' child-rearing decisions.

"[1] Bitsy and Brad choose to maintain much about what makes Jin-Ho Korean, and, while Sami and Ziba do not forget this piece of who Susan is, they do not focus on it as much.

The Yazdans have a very small group of people to greet the baby at the airport, while the Donaldsons invite all of their extended family.

[2][3] Tyler herself expounds that "for 44 years, his very large and complicated family has been giving me a close look at what it means to be foreign — to view America from the outside, to attempt to 'dig' one's way inside.

It is noteworthy that Tyler's husband, Taghi Modaressi, also left Iran in the late 1950s to escape persecution by the Shah's secret police.

[5] The friction in the novel between Maryam and her daughter-in-law's parents in a large part devolves from their strong positive feelings toward the Shah.

"[6] The Daily Telegraph praised the book, calling it "...a comedy that is not so much brilliant as luminous – its observant sharpness sweetened by a generous understanding of human fallibility.

So sure is her tone, so graceful her style, that the reader absorbs without literary indigestion a narrative constructed almost entirely of grand set-pieces of domestic comedy.

"[7] Ron Charles of The Washington Post wrote "With her 17th novel, Tyler has delivered something startlingly fresh while retaining everything we love about her work.

"[8] Michiko Kakutani wrote in her New York Times book review column, Digging to America "is arguably her most ambitious novel yet: a novel that not only provides an intimate portrait of a Baltimore family (or, in this case, two Baltimore families), as almost all of her books do, but also unfolds gently to look at what it means to be an American.

Anyone who has grown up with her books...has by now become familiar with her unflashy mastery of the national idiom, her dour whimsy, her tapestries of suffocating families and the rogue siblings and spouses who try, and usually fail, to become unknitted from their tight weave....But in "Digging to America," Tyler's characters face the future, not the past, so she doesn't let the freight of personal history freeze their forward motion, although it sometimes slows them down....Tyler has begun to shift her focus as she wrestles with the question of how an individual moves forward.