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by Ayad Akhtar
A deeply personal work about identity and belonging in a nation coming apart at the seams, this book blends fact and fiction to tell an epic story of longing and dispossession in the world that 9/11 made. Part family drama, part social essay, part picaresque novel, at its heart it is the story of a father, a son, and the country they both call home.
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by Yangsze Choo
Li Lan, the daughter of a respectable Chinese family in colonial Malaysia, hopes for a favorable marriage, but her father has lost his fortune, and she has few suitors. Instead, the wealthy Lim family urges her to become a "ghost bride" for their son, who has recently died under mysterious circumstances. Rarely practiced, a traditional ghost marriage is used to placate a restless spirit. Such a union would guarantee Li Lan a home for the rest of her days, but at what price?
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by Clarissa Goenawan
University sophomore Miwako Sumida has hanged herself, leaving those closest to her reeling. In the months before her suicide, she was hiding away in a remote mountainside village, but what, or whom, was she running from?
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by Gish Jen
The time: not so long from now. The place: AutoAmerica, a country surveilled by one "Aunt Nettie," a Big Brother that is part artificial intelligence, part internet, and oddly human--even funny. The people: divided. The "angelfair" Netted have jobs and, what with the country half under water, literally occupy the high ground. The Surplus live on swampland if they're lucky, on water if they're not.
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by Alma Katsu
In an internment camp in Idaho in 1944, American-born Meiko Briggs and her daughter Aiko dream of their home in Seattle and the safe return of Meiko's husband who is away with the Air Force. A sickness starts to spread amongst those in the camp and though it starts as a minor cold it triggers spontaneous fits of aggression followed by death.
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by R. O. Kwon
Phoebe and Will meet in their first month at prestigious Edwards University. Phoebe is a glamorous girl who blames herself for her mother's death. Will is a misfit who transfers to Edwards from Bible college, waiting tables in secret to get by. What he knows for sure is that he loves Phoebe.
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by R. F. Kuang
So what if June edits Athena's novel and sends it to her agent as her own work? So what if she lets her new publisher rebrand her as Juniper Song--complete with an ambiguously ethnic author photo? Doesn't this piece of history deserve to be told, whoever the teller? That's what June claims, and the New York Times bestseller list seems to agree.
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by Celeste Ng
Twelve-year-old Bird Gardner lives a quiet existence with his loving father, a former linguist who now shelves books in a university library. His mother, Margaret, a Chinese American poet, left without a trace when he was nine years old. He doesn't know what happened to her--only that her books have been banned--and he resents that she cared more about her work than about him.
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by Riku Onda
On a stormy summer day the Aosawas, owners of a prominent local hospital, host a large birthday party. The occasion turns into tragedy when 17 people die from cyanide in their drinks. The only surviving links to what might have happened are a cryptic verse that could be the killer's, and the physician's bewitching blind daughter, Hisako, the only person spared injury.
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by Masatsugu Ono
In a fishing village on the Japanese coast, a new police chief plays audience for the locals, who routinely approach him with bottles of liquor and stories to tell. As the city council election approaches, and as tongues are loosened by drink, evidence of rampant corruption piles up--and a long-held feud between the village's captains of industry, two brothers-in-law, threatens to boil over.
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by Fariha Râoisâin
Taylia Chatterjee has never known love, and certainly has never felt it for herself. Growing up on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, with her older sister Alyssa, their parents were both overbearing and emotionally distant, and despite idyllic summers in the Catskills, and gatherings with glamorous family friends, there is a sadness that emanates from the Chatterjee residence, a deep well of sorrow stemming from the racism of American society.
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by Rakesh Satyal
In a suburb outside Cleveland, a community of Indian Americans has settled into lives that straddle the divide between Eastern and Western cultures. For some, America is a bewildering and alienating place where coworkers can't pronounce your name but will eagerly repeat the Sanskrit phrases from their yoga class.
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by Stephanie Scott
In Japan, a covert industry has grown up around the "wakaresaseya" (literally "breaker-upper"), a person hired by one spouse to seduce the other in order to gain the advantage in divorce proceedings. When Satō hires Kaitarō, a wakaresaseya agent, to have an affair with his wife, Rina, he assumes it will be an easy case. But Satō has never truly understood Rina or her desires ...
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by Madeleine Thien
At the center of this epic story are two young women, Marie and Ai-Ming. Through their relationship Marie strives to piece together the tale of her fractured family in present-day Vancouver, seeking answers in the fragile layers of their collective story.
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by Nghi Vo
Jordan Baker grows up in the most rarefied circles of 1920s American society--she has money, education, a killer golf handicap, and invitations to some of the most exclusive parties of the Jazz Age. She's also queer and Asian, a Vietnamese adoptee treated as an exotic attraction by her peers, while the most important doors remain closed to her.
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by Ryan Lee Wong
Twenty-one-year-old Reed is fed up. Angry about the killing of a Black man by an Asian American NYPD officer, he wants to drop out of college and devote himself to the Black Lives Matter movement. But would that truly bring him closer to the moral life he seeks? In a series of intimate, charged conversations, his mother-once the leader of a Korean-Black coalition-demands that he rethink his outrage, and along with it, what it means to be an organizer, a student, an ally, an American, and a son.
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by Susie Yang
Raised outside of Boston, Ivy's immigrant grandmother relies on Ivy's mild appearance for cover as she teaches her granddaughter how to pilfer items from yard sales and second-hand shops. Thieving allows Ivy to accumulate the trappings of a suburban teen--and, most importantly, to attract the attention of Gideon Speyer, the golden boy of a wealthy political family.
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by Banana Yoshimoto
Yoshie is haunted by nightmares in which her father is looking for the phone he left behind on the day he died, or on which she is trying--unsuccessfully--to call him. Is her dead father trying to communicate a message to her through these dreams?
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by Miri Yåu
Kazu is dead. Born in Fukushima in 1933, the same year as the Japanese Emperor, his life is tied by a series of coincidences to the Imperial family and has been shaped at every turn by modern Japanese history. But his life story is also marked by bad luck, and now, in death, he is unable to rest, doomed to haunt the park near Ueno Station in Tokyo.
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by Jenny Zhang
Daiyu never wanted to be like the tragic heroine for whom she was named, revered for her beauty and cursed with heartbreak. But when she is kidnapped and smuggled across an ocean from China to America, Daiyu must relinquish the home and future she imagined for herself.
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Maybe this list isn't your jam. 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.
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