|
|
by Tash Aw
Ah Hock is an ordinary man of simple means. Born and raised in a Malaysian fishing village, he favors stability above all, a preference at odds with his rapidly modernizing surroundings. So what brings him to kill a man?
|
|
|
by Nick Bradley
In Tokyo - one of the world's largest megacities - a stray cat is wending her way through the back alleys. And, with each detour, she brushes up against the seemingly disparate lives of the city-dwellers, connecting them in unexpected ways.
|
|
|
by Leah Franqui
Recently widowed Pival Sengupta has never travelled alone before and her first trip to this strange country masks a secret agenda: to find out the truth about her long-estranged son.
|
|
|
by Simon Han
From the outside, the Chengs seem like so-called model immigrants. Once Patty landed a tech job near Dallas, she and Liang grew secure enough to have a second child, and to send for their first from his grandparents back in China. Isn't this what they sacrificed so much for?
|
|
|
by Gish Jen
Beginning with a cheery letter penned by a Chinese girl in heaven to "poor Mr. Nixon" in hell, Gish Jen embarks on a fictional journey through U.S.-China relations, capturing the excitement of a world on the brink of tectonic change.
|
|
|
by Meng Jin
On the night of June Fourth, a woman gives birth in a Beijing hospital alone. Thus begins the unraveling of Su Lan, a brilliant physicist who until this moment has successfully erased her past, fighting what she calls the mind's arrow of time.
|
|
|
by Toshikazu Kawaguchi
In a small back alley of Tokyo, there is a café that has been serving carefully brewed coffee for more than one hundred years. Local legend says that this shop offers something else besides coffee--the chance to travel back in time.
|
|
|
by Mieko Kawakami
A boy goes to the supermarket almost every day, just so he can look at the face of the woman who sells sandwiches. She is beautiful to him, and he calls her "Ms Ice Sandwich", and endlessly draws her portrait. When the boy's friend hears about this hesitant adoration, suddenly everything changes.
|
|
|
by Lisa Ko
In the early 1980s, Giselle Chin, Jackie Ong, and Ellen Ng are three teenagers drawn together by their shared sense of alienation and desire for something different. "Allied in the weirdest parts of themselves," they envision each other as artistic collaborators and embark on a future defined by freedom and creativity.
|
|
|
by Jean Kwok
It begins with a mystery. Sylvie, the beautiful, brilliant, successful older daughter of the Lee family, flies to the Netherlands for one final visit with her dying grandmother--and then vanishes. Timid and shy, Amy has always looked up to her sister, the fierce and fearless protector who showered her with unconditional love. But what happened to Sylvie?
|
|
|
by Vanessa Lawrence
Biracial and bisexual, Lily learns to navigate high society parties, microaggressions at work and her relationship with her girlfriend after accepting a ride home from a fashion world business titan who can advance her career and love life.
|
|
|
by Chang-rae Lee
When Pong brings Tiller along on a boisterous trip across Asia, he is pulled into a series of ever more extreme and eye-opening experiences that transform his view of the world, of Pong, and of himself.
|
|
|
by Kathryn Ma
Eighteen-year-old Shelley dreams of bigger things. He heads to San Francisco to claim his destiny, confident that any hurdles will be easily overcome by the awesome powers of the "Chinese groove," a belief in the unspoken bonds between countrymen that transcend time and borders.
|
|
|
by Syed Masood
It is 1995, and Anvar Faris is a restless, rebellious, and sharp-tongued boy doing his best to grow up in Karachi, Pakistan. His family decides, not quite unanimously, to start life over in California. Ironically, Anvar's deeply devout mother and his model-Muslim brother adjust easily to life in America, while his fun-loving father can't find anyone he relates to. For his part, Anvar fully commits to being a bad Muslim.
|
|
|
by Fatima Farheen Mirza
As an Indian wedding gathers a family back together, parents Rafiq and Layla must reckon with the choices their children have made. There is Hadia: their headstrong, eldest daughter, whose marriage is a match of love and not tradition. Huda, the middle child, determined to follow in her sister's footsteps. And lastly, their estranged son, Amar, who returns to the family fold for the first time in three years to take his place as brother of the bride.
|
|
|
by Sayaka Murata
Keiko has never fit in, neither in her family, nor in school, but when at the age of eighteen she begins working at the Hiiromachi branch of "Smile Mart," she finds peace and purpose in her life. In the store, unlike anywhere else, she understands the rules of social interaction--many are laid out line by line in the store's manual--and she plays the part of a "normal" person excellently, more or less.
|
|
|
by Sameer Pandya
First the white members of Raj Bhatt's posh tennis club call him racist. Then his life falls apart. Along the way, he wonders: where does he, a brown man, belong in America?
|
|
|
by Thao Thai
A sweeping, evocative debut novel following three generations of Vietnamese American women, revealing the family's inherited burdens, buried secrets, and unlikely love stories.
|
|
|
by Charles Yu
Willis Wu doesn't perceive himself as the protagonist in his own life: he's merely Generic Asian Man. Sometimes he gets to be Background Oriental Making a Weird Face or even Disgraced Son, but always he is relegated to a prop. Yet every day, he leaves his tiny room in a Chinatown SRO and enters the Golden Palace restaurant, where he's a bit player, too.
|
|
|
by C Pam Zhang
Newly orphaned children of immigrants, Lucy and Sam are suddenly alone in a land that refutes their existence. Fleeing the threats of their western mining town, they set off to bury their father in the only way that will set them free from their past.
|
|
Maybe this list isn't your jam. Check out the RPL Readers page for more lists. Or, if you'd prefer a hand-crafted, bespoke book suggestion list, try The Bookologist service. You need an RPL Library card to access. Don't have one? Find out how to get one here.
|
|
|
|
|
|