In 1978, Congress established Asian/Pacific American Heritage Week, and in 1992, this celebration was expanded to the whole month of May. In 1997, AAPI Heritage Month was further divided into two groups—Asian and Native Hawaiian/Other Pacific Islander.
Take a look at some of these hot new books below and discover a new author to fall in love with.
Debut Authors
The Killing Spell by Shay Kauwe
In this spellbinding fantasy debut set in a future where language magic reigns, a young Hawaiian woman must solve a murder to clear her name.
Shay Kauwe was born and raised on the island of O'ahu and grew up on the Hawaiian Homelands in Waimanalo. She worked in Russia as an English teacher but was eventually drawn back home. While she has a corporate job in telecommunications, Shay continues to educate with the Hawaii Literacy Project. She resides in Honolulu with her husband, Denis, and their poi dog, Iris.
In the waning years of the Azalea Dynasty, the emperor is dying, the land is consumed by famine, and poetry magic is lost to all except the powerful. Wei Yin is desperate. After the fifth death of a sibling, with her family and village on the brink of starvation, she will do anything to save those she loves. Even offer herself as concubine to the cruel heir of the beautiful and brutal Azalea House. But in a twist of fate, the palace stands on the knife-edge of civil war with Wei trapped in its center at the side of a violent prince.
Shen Tao immigrated to Canada at an early age and grew up inspired by both Chinese and Western stories. She has wanted to be a writer for as long as she can remember.
Leave and Come Back by Lavanya Lakshmi
You're invited to the most romantic, chaotic wedding of the season. For the first time, Simran Gopal is living out her own swoon-worthy romance to rival the beloved Bollywood films of her childhood... until she receives her cousin's wedding invitation. Now, Simran finds herself returning to the family home she's been avoiding for the last seven years to take part in a two-week-long Indian wedding. Family drama is already at a high when Leo Bridgers, Simran's new boyfriend, accidentally crashes the engagement party.
Lavanya Lakshmi has lived in nine cities across India, China, the US and Canada. One of her many childhood homes was a suite on the 37th floor of a luxury hotel. She earned a Master's degree from NYU and lived in New York City for nine years before moving to Toronto, where she currently resides, despite being a very vocal hater of cold weather. She has worked in and around book publishing her whole career.
New Books by Known Authors
The Valley of Vengeful Ghosts by Kim Fu
In the aftermath of her mother's death, Eleanor is unmoored. For years, her mother orchestrated every detail of her life—from meals to laundry to finances—so that Eleanor could focus on her career as a therapist. Left to navigate the world on her own, Eleanor clings to her mother's final directive: use her inheritance to buy a house. Haunted by the stories of her clients, a stream of workmen and bureaucrats she can't trust, and visions of ghosts from her past and present, Eleanor's reality unravels, and she is forced to reckon with the secrets she's buried and the dark choices she's made.
Kim Fu is the author of two novels, a collection of poetry, and the story collection Lesser Known Monsters of the 21st Century, winner of the Washington State Book Award, the Pacific Northwest Book Award, and the Danuta Gleed Literary Award, as well as a finalist for the Scotiabank Giller Prize, the Ignyte Awards, and the Shirley Jackson Awards. Fu lives in Seattle, Washington.
My Dear You: Stories by Rachel Khong
The characters in My Dear You find themselves facing extraordinary choices in scenarios that range from the everyday to the absurd: The U.S. government injects all citizens with a drug that makes them see everyone else as members of their own race and gender. God does away with humans in favor of something much better. A woman adopts a cat who conjures the ghosts of her ex-loves. A factory worker decides to befriend a sex doll she is tasked with selling.
Rachel Khong is the author of Goodbye, Vitamin, winner of the California Book Award for First Fiction. Real Americans, her second novel, was a New York Times bestseller. In 2018, Khong founded The Ruby, a work and event space for women and nonbinary writers and artists in San Francisco's Mission District. With friends, she teaches creative writing at The Dream Side.
Set in a fictional country in the present day, this is a story told through the eyes of an ex-military dog, Etna. After surviving years of a devastating war, Etna decides one night to leave the men he has fought alongside for years and return home—to the place where he was taken from when he was young, in the thin but persistent hope that if a home exists for him, it might be there. Thus begins an exhilarating odyssey told through the eyes of a dog as he traverses ruined landscapes and fights to survive in a world that, even in peacetime, proves just as precarious.
Paul Yoon is the author of six works of fiction: Etna; Once the Shore, a New York Times Notable Book; Snow Hunters, winner of the Young Lions Fiction Award; The Mountain, an NPR Best Book of the Year; Run Me to Earth, a Time Must-Read Books of 2020 and longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction; and The Hive and the Honey, winner of the 20th Annual Story Prize and longlisted for the Joyce Carol Oates prize.
American Hagwon by Jin Min Lee
In schools and churches, hotel rooms and nail salons, law firms and fried-fish shops; in cramped, dingy apartments and luxury, gated communities, the men, women, and children in American Hagwon struggle to find satisfaction and meaning in a world that seems to grow less forgiving with each passing year.
After attending the Bronx High School of Science, Lee studied history and was a resident of Trumbull at Yale College in Connecticut. While at Yale, she attended her first writing workshop, as part of a nonfiction writing class she had signed up for in her junior year. She studied law at Georgetown University Law Center and later worked as a corporate lawyer in New York from 1993 to 1995.
Babylon, South Dakota by Tom Lin
When Saul Keng Hsiu and his wife, Mei Lee, move from China to the United States to take possession of a 160-acre homestead bequeathed to them by a distant relative, all they have are the possessions on their back, some hidden gold, and a pocketful of chrysanthemum seeds. After a rocky start and a long, harsh winter, the couple finds themselves successfully raising chrysanthemums and livestock, and soon after, a daughter, Mara. But when representatives from the US Army Corps of Engineers buy an acre of the Hsiu's farmland and begin building a missile silo, the inexplicable starts to occur: Mara can commune with the animals on the farm, Mei develops a hidden talent for augury, and the chrysanthemums become impervious to everything.
Tom Lin was born in China and immigrated to the United States when he was four. A graduate of Pomona College, he also holds a PhD from the University of California, Davis. His first novel, The Thousand Crimes of Ming Tsu, won the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence. He teaches English and creative writing at the University of Iowa.
When a hit-and-run shatters more than his body, a writer is caught between revelation and madness as an uncanny pull toward a brilliant campus colleague ensnares him in a scandal that threatens to destroy them both. What begins as a provocative portrait of academic and cultural warfare deepens into erotic entanglement, the exposure of a family secret, and the mystery surrounding the narrator's accident—both the violence and its aftermath.
Ayad Akhtar is a novelist and playwright. His work has been published and performed in over two dozen languages. He is the winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, the Edith Wharton Citation of Merit for Fiction, and an award in literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, among other honors.
Add a comment to: Anticipated Titles from Up-and-Coming AAPI Authors