Discover Powerful Narratives: AAPI Month Book Recommendations

When Advika meets infamous film producer Julian, she's instantly swept off her feet and under his spell, despite their 40+ year age gap. But when an ex-wife of Julian's dies, leaving Advika a film reel and a million dollars – if she divorces Julian first – she decides to find out more about her husband's ex-wives for herself. A page-turner.

As the only child of a single mother in Queens, Ava Chin found her family's origins to be shrouded in mystery. Mott Street traces Chin's quest to understand her Chinese American family's story. Gorgeously written, deeply researched, and tremendously resonant, Mott Street uncovers a legacy of exclusion and resilience that speaks to the American experience, past and present.

This fresh and unique work of metafiction follows Benson Yu, a writer, who loses control of his own narrative when he attempts to write the story of his fraught upbringing in 1980s Chinatown. The creator of a bestselling comic book, Yu is struggling with continuing the poignant tale of Benny and Constantine and can't help but interject from the present day, slowly revealing a darker backstory. Can Yu confront the demons he's spent his adult life avoiding or risk his own life...and Benny's?

Blow by blow, Annie Lin's life crumbles. Her dance studio goes bankrupt. Her mother and beloved dog are gone the same year. Then a terrible accident leaves her young son traumatized. It's time for a change. A new life in paradise should have healed her wounds. But for a woman struggling to hold on to her family and her sanity, one stormy night could change everything.

This dazzling, subversive, and deeply hopeful book offers us different ways to experience time--inspired by pre-industrial cultures, ecological cues, and geological timescales--that can bring within reach a more humane, responsive way of living. Saving Time tugs at the seams of reality as we know it--the way we experience time itself--and rearranges it, imagining a world not centered on work, the office clock, or the profit motive. 

Our narrator produces a sound from the piano no one else at the Conservatory can. But when an accident leaves her parents debilitated, she abandons her future for a job at a high-end beauty and wellness store in New York City. A piercing, darkly funny debut, Natural Beauty explores questions of consumerism, self-worth, race, and identity-and leaves readers with a shocking and unsettling truth.

When a local teenager discovers a severed hand and foot washed up on the shore of the small town of Point Mettier, Alaska, Cara Kennedy is on the case. A detective from Anchorage, she has her own motives for investigating the possible murder in this isolated place, which can be accessed only by a tunnel. Haunted by her past, Cara soon discovers that everyone in this town has something to hide. Will she be able to unravel their secrets before she unravels?

From the internationally bestselling author of The Mountains Sing, a propulsive and moving tale of wartime love, family, and loss, as an American GI, two Vietnamese bargirls, and an Amerasian man are forced to make decisions during and after the Việt Nam War that will reverberate throughout each other's lives. 

After being tasked with her first major project for the master perfumer, Radha travels to India, enlisting the help of her sisters and the courtesans of Agra, but discovers that the son she gave up years earlier is heading to locate her in Paris--threatening her marriage and carefully managed world.

Alternating between multiple perspectives, Our Best Intentions is a pulsating story about a father and daughter re-examining their familial bonds and place in the community. Both a gripping page-turner and an intimate portrait of an immigrant family, Vibhuti Jain's provocative debut explores how easily friendships, careers, communities, and individual lives can unravel when the toxicity of privilege and racial bias are exposed.