Must-Read Books for Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander Heritage Month

From the award-winning author of Goodbye, Vitamin: How far would you go to shape your own destiny? An exhilarating novel of American identity that spans three generations in one family and asks: What makes us who we are? And how inevitable are our futures?

Tasked with finding the reincarnation of a great lama — a spiritual teacher who may have been born anywhere in the vast Mongolian landscape — the young monk Chuluun sets out with his identical twin, Mun, who has rejected the monastic life they once shared. Their relationship will be tested on this journey through their homeland as each possesses the ability to hear the other’s thoughts.

House of Many Gods is an epic and inventive story that follows Ana, a Hawaiian physician, and Nikolai, a Russian filmmaker, across decades and continents. When Nikolai comes to Kaua’i to unearth the ecological horrors that are afflicting the islands, he meets Ana and suddenly their lives become intertwined in a way neither thought possible. It is an unforgettable novel of loss and remembrance, of the search for family and identity, and ultimately, of the redemptive power of love.

A collection of over 200 breathtaking photos celebrating the history and cultural impact of the Asian American social justice movement, from beloved photographer Corky Lee who sought to change the world, one photograph at a time. Asian American writers, artists, activists, and friends of Lee reflect on his life and career and provide rich historical and cultural context to his photographs, including a foreword from writer Hua Hsu and contributions from artist Ai Weiwei, filmmaker Renée Tajima-Peña, writer Helen Zia, photographer Alan Chin, historian Gordon Chang, playwright David Henry Hwang, and more.

The heartfelt memoir of a trans pageant queen from the Philippines who went back into the closet to model in New York City. But as her star rose, her sense of self eroded. She craved acceptance as her authentic self yet had to remain vigilant in order to protect her dream career. Finally, Geena realized that living her truth was the only way to step into her full power. A dazzling testimony from an icon who sits at the center of transgender history and activism, Horse Barbie is a celebratory and universal story of survival, love, and pure joy.

From visionary director Jon M. Chu comes a powerful, inspiring memoir of belonging, creativity, and learning to see who you really are.

In this deeply intimate second poetry collection, Ocean Vuong searches for life among the aftershocks of his mother’s death, embodying the paradox of sitting within grief while being determined to survive beyond it. At once vivid, bare, and propulsive, Vuong’s poems circle fragmented lives to find both restoration as well as the epicenter of the break.

Nestled in New York’s Hudson Valley is a luxury retreat boasting every amenity. The catch? For nine months, you cannot leave the grounds while you dedicate yourself to the task of producing the perfect baby. For someone else. Jane, an immigrant from the Philippines, is in desperate search of a better future when she commits to being a “Host” at Golden Oaks. But now pregnant, fragile, consumed with worry for her family, Jane is determined to reconnect with her life outside.

A forbidden affair erupts volcanically amid a decadent tropical wedding in this outrageous comedy of manners from the iconic author of Crazy Rich Asians.

How do we understand ourselves when the story about who we are supposed to be is stronger than our sense of self? What do we stand to gain — and lose — by taking control of our narrative? These questions propel Prachi Gupta’s heartfelt memoir and can feel particularly fraught for immigrants and their children who live under immense pressure to belong in America.

A newly sober, orphaned son of Iranian immigrants, guided by the voices of artists, poets, and kings, embarks on a remarkable search for a family secret that leads him to a terminally ill painter living out her final days in the Brooklyn Museum. Electrifying, funny, and wholly original, Martyr! heralds the arrival of an essential new voice in contemporary fiction.

From the bestselling, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Interpreter of Maladies: These eight stories take us from Cambridge and Seattle to India and Thailand, as they explore the secrets at the heart of family life.

A stunning debut novel about an immigrant Vietnamese family who settles in New Orleans and struggles to remain connected to one another as their lives are inextricably reshaped.

Iranian-American multimillionaires Ali and Homa Milani have it all — a McMansion in the hills of LA, a microwaveable snack empire, and four spirited daughters. On the verge of landing their own reality TV show, the Milanis realize their deepest secrets are about to be dragged out into the open before the cameras even roll. Each of the Milanis — even their aloof Persian cat Pari — has something to hide, but the looming scrutiny of fame also threatens to bring the family closer than ever. Dramatic, biting yet full of heart, Tehrangeles is a tragicomic saga about high-functioning family dysfunction and the ever-present struggle to accept one’s true self.

Following two families from Pakistan and Iraq in the 1990s to San Francisco in 2016, The Bad Muslim Discount is an inclusive, comic novel about Muslim immigrants finding their way in modern America.

Four mothers, four daughters, four families whose histories shift with the four winds depending on who’s “saying” the stories. In 1949 four Chinese women, recent immigrants to San Francisco, begin meeting to eat dim sum, play mahjong, and talk. United in shared unspeakable loss and hope, they call themselves the Joy Luck Club.

From a wry, insightful, and very funny new voice, here is one woman’s peripatetic search for home, from Kashmir to England to Saudi Arabia to Michigan to Rome and, finally, to Los Angeles.

A singular, beautifully written coming-of-age memoir of a Filipino boy with albinism whose story travels from an immigrant childhood to Harvard to a gender transition and illuminates the illusions of race, disability, and gender.

In this exhilarating novel, two friends — often in love, but never lovers — come together as creative partners in the world of video game design, where success brings them fame, joy, tragedy, duplicity, and, ultimately, a kind of immortality. Spanning thirty years, Gabrielle Zevin’s Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow is a dazzling and intricately imagined novel that examines the multifarious nature of identity, disability, failure, the redemptive possibilities in play, and above all, our need to connect: To be loved and to love.

The much-anticipated follow up to the groundbreaking anthology Disability Visibility: Another revolutionary collection of first-person writing on the joys and challenges of the modern disability experience, and intimacy in all its myriad forms.

In these nine stunningly original, provocative, and poignant stories, Ted Chiang tackles some of humanity’s oldest questions along with new quandaries only he could imagine.

Know My Name will forever transform the way we think about sexual assault, challenging our beliefs about what is acceptable and speaking truth to the tumultuous reality of healing. It also introduces readers to an extraordinary writer, one whose words have already changed our world. Entwining pain, resilience, and humor, this memoir will stand as a modern classic.

An increasingly relevant story told with startling lucidity, humor, and an uncanny ear for the intimacies and shorthand of family ritual, America Is Not the Heart is a sprawling, soulful debut about three generations of women in one family struggling to balance the promise of the American dream and the unshakeable grip of history.

In this hilariously savage, poignant novel by acclaimed author Katherine Min, a grieving daughter’s revenge on the man who caused her mother’s death sets off a series of unexpected reckonings.

In stories told in alternating voices, Jean Chen Ho’s debut novel peels back the layers of female friendship — the intensity, resentment, and boundless love — to probe the beating hearts of two young Taiwanese American women as they navigate friendship, sexuality, identity, and heartbreak over two decades.

Yiyun Li meets life’s deepest sorrows as she imagines a conversation between a mother and child in a timeless world. Composed in the months after she lost a child to suicide, Where Reasons End trespasses into the space between life and death as mother and child talk, free from old images and narratives. Deeply moving, these conversations portray the love and complexity of a relationship.

From bestselling author R. O. Kwon, an exhilarating, blazing-hot novel about a woman caught between her desires and her life. Vital, bold, powerful, and deeply moving, Exhibit asks: How brightly can you burn before you light your life on fire?

The unforgettable, heartbreaking story of the unlikely friendship between a wealthy boy and the son of his father’s servant, caught in the tragic sweep of history, The Kite Runner transports readers to Afghanistan at a tense and crucial moment of change and destruction. A powerful story of friendship, it is also about the power of reading, the price of betrayal, and the possibility of redemption; and an exploration of the influence of fathers over sons — their love, their sacrifices, their lies.

From the indie rockstar of Japanese Breakfast fame, and author of the viral 2018 New Yorker essay that shares the title of this book, an unflinching, powerful memoir about growing up Korean American, losing her mother, and forging her own identity.

The dramatic real life stories of four young people caught up in the mass exodus of Shanghai in the wake of China’s 1949 Communist revolution — a heartrending precursor to the struggles faced by emigrants today.

In this heart-pounding debut thriller for fans of Lisa Jewell and Celeste Ng, a first-generation Vietnamese American artist must confront nightmares past and present … With dizzying twists, You Know What You Did is both a harrowing thriller and a heartfelt exploration of the refugee experience, the legacies we leave for our children, and the unbreakable bonds between mothers and daughters.

In a stunning collection that announces the arrival of an incredible talent, Kristiana Kahakauwila travels the islands of Hawai’i, making the fabled place her own. Exploring the deep tensions between local and tourist, tradition and expectation, façade and authentic self, This Is Paradise provides an unforgettable portrait of life as it’s truly being lived on Maui, Oahu, Kaua’i and the Big Island.

A searing, deeply candid memoir about a young woman’s journey to understanding her complicated parents — her mother an Okinawan war bride, her father a Vietnam veteran — and her own, fraught cultural heritage.

When a young woman is found dead on her college campus, her sister doesn’t believe it was an accident — and her search for answers leads her closer to home than she ever would have imagined in this thrilling debut novel from an exciting new talent.

From the rubble-strewn streets of U.S.-occupied Baghdad, Hadi — a scavenger and an oddball fixture at a local café — collects human body parts and stitches them together to create a corpse. His goal, he claims, is for the government to recognize the parts as people and to give them a proper burial. But when the corpse goes missing, a wave of eerie murders sweeps the city, and reports stream in of a horrendous-looking criminal who, though shot, cannot be killed. Frankenstein in Baghdad captures with white-knuckle horror and black humor the surreal reality of contemporary Iraq.

A riveting debut novel set in contemporary Seoul, South Korea, about four young women making their way in a world defined by impossible standards of beauty, after-hours room salons catering to wealthy men, ruthless social hierarchies, and K-pop mania.

Poet and essayist Cathy Park Hong fearlessly and provocatively blends memoir, cultural criticism, and history to expose fresh truths about racialized consciousness in America. Part memoir and part cultural criticism, this collection is vulnerable, humorous, and provocative — and its relentless and riveting pursuit of vital questions around family and friendship, art and politics, identity and individuality, will change the way you think about our world.

When a father goes missing, his family’s desperate search leads them to question everything they know about him and one another in this thrilling page-turner, a deeply moving portrait of a family in crisis from the award-winning author of Miracle Creek.

Nearing the age at which his mother had migrated to the US, Albert Samaha began to question the ironclad belief in a better future that had inspired her family to uproot themselves from their birthplace. Tracing his family’s history through the region’s unique geopolitical roots in Spanish colonialism, American intervention, and Japanese occupation, Samaha fits their arc into the wider story of global migration as determined by chess moves among superpowers. Ambitious, intimate, and incisive, Concepcion explores what it might mean to reckon with the unjust legacy of imperialism, to live with contradiction and hope, to fight for the unrealized ideals of an inherited homeland.

In her award-winning book The Woman Warrior, Maxine Hong Kingston created an entirely new form — an exhilarating blend of autobiography and mythology, of world and self, of hot rage and cool analysis. First published in 1976, it has become a classic in its innovative portrayal of multiple and intersecting identities — immigrant, female, Chinese, American.

The award-winning author of The Leavers offers a visionary novel of friendship, art, and ambition that asks: What is the value of a meaningful life? Moving from the predigital 1980s to the art and tech subcultures of the 1990s to a strikingly imagined portrait of the 2040s, Memory Piece is an innovative and audacious story of three lifelong friends as they strive to build satisfying lives in a world that turns out to be radically different from the one they were promised.

Full of Ozeki’s signature humor and deeply engaged with the relationship between writer and reader, past and present, fact and fiction, quantum physics, history, and myth, A Tale for the Time Being is a brilliantly inventive, beguiling story of our shared humanity and the search for home.

In 1965, a new immigration law lifted a century of restrictions against Asian immigrants to the United States. Over the next forty years, millions would arrive, including Jay Caspian Kang’s parents. These immigrants came to this country looking for the American Dream, but found that they were forced to live in the fringes, neither truly white nor truly “people of color.” Kang recognizes this existential loneliness in himself and in other Asian Americans who try to locate themselves in the country’s racial binary. With the wave of rising anti-Asian violence, this book is now needed more than ever.