Each May, AAPI Heritage Month shines a spotlight on the contributions of Asian American and Pacific Islander communities — a label that covers over seventy countries and countless experiences, from the rice terraces of Luzon, to the peaks of the Hindu Kush, to the coral islands of Polynesia.The timing isn't arbitrary. May was chosen to mark …
The Best Books Of The 2020s By AAPI Authors To Add To Your TBR Immediately – women.com
Each May, AAPI Heritage Month shines a spotlight on the contributions of Asian American and Pacific Islander communities — a label that covers over seventy countries and countless experiences, from the rice terraces of Luzon, to the peaks of the Hindu Kush, to the coral islands of Polynesia.
The timing isn’t arbitrary. May was chosen to mark two key moments in US history: the arrival of the first Japanese immigrants in 1843, and the completion of the transcontinental railroad in 1869, a feat made possible by Chinese laborers. Today, more than a century later, literature helps bring many of those stories back to the surface.
You might already be thanking AAPI founders for your favorite beauty brands, but the brilliance extends far beyond skincare, as the authors on this list are building something that lasts far longer. These books are proof that there’s no single way to write from or about the AAPI experience. They reflect the richness of AAPI life in its many forms. Here, you’ll find stories shaped by migration, language, family, faith, and the ordinary details that don’t always make it into official history. If you’re drawn to what exists between the headlines, you’ll find plenty here to hold onto.
We’ve long trusted the Good Morning America book club to pick thrillers and mysteries, but who would have guessed they had a soft spot for top-tier tearjerkers, too? Case in point: “Homeseeking” by Karissa Chen — an epic, intimate novel that spans continents, decades, and heartbreaks.
The story begins in a California supermarket, where Haiwen, recently widowed, sees Suchi — his first love — for the first time in sixty years. From there, the novel splits. Haiwen’s narrative moves backward in time from old age; Suchi’s moves forward from childhood. Their timelines cross and recross, eventually converging in a shared past neither has forgotten.
Chen’s beautiful novel drifts through the long shadow of modern Chinese history: the ruins of postwar Shanghai, the rigid world of Taiwanese army camps, the dislocation of immigrant life in the Los Angeles suburbs. But for all its sociopolitical breadth, it remains anchored in the personal. It’s as much about the cost of decisions made too young, and the way memory can both protect and haunt us. If you love historical fiction but hate when it feels stiff, “Homecoming” is your antidote.
Ocean Vuong’s reputation precedes him. A MacArthur Fellow and prize-winning poet, he’s also the author of “On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous,” one of the best picks from Dua Lipa’s book club, Service95. With “The Emperor of Gladness,” he returns as one of the defining voices of contemporary literature.
Vuong’s second novel arrives beneath a considerable canopy of expectation. In “The Emperor of Gladness,” he shifts from autofiction to a story situated in the fictional town of East Gladness, Connecticut. A teenage boy named Hai considers ending his life on a rainy bridge, but is interrupted by Grazine, an elderly widow with advancing dementia. From there stems a year of uneasy cohabitation and unlikely kinship, as Hai becomes Grazine’s caretaker and finds, in these shared days, a reason to keep going. Moving through the fragility of post-industrial America, Vuong threads through these themes of precarity, caretaking, displacement, economic strain, and cultural amnesia.
Vuong’s language is unmistakable. At times, the language opens something precise. Elsewhere, it draws attention to itself and away from the narrative. Still, the novel’s ambition is clear. It attempts to hold space for people often left out of literature’s central frame. As one enthusiastic fan told Goodreads, “My second five-star book of the year so far, and the magic of it still lingers, like an unsolved riddle in the back of my mind.”
After the cult success of “Natural Beauty” — the stylish, offbeat satire on wellness culture — Ling Ling Huang follows it up with a heady novel that’s as formally daring as her debut. Foregrounding fraught friendship and intrusive innovation, “Immaculate Conception” poses what might happen when empathy becomes a science.
Enka is a stalled art student who forms a close and increasingly strange attachment to her classmate Mathilde, a gifted, volatile artist whose ascent is both thrilling and destabilizing. When Mathilde’s star rises, Enka’s desperation to stay close to her leads her down an extreme and surreal path — marrying into a tech empire and developing a procedure that allows one person to absorb another’s trauma. The line between witness and inhabiting becomes blurred.
Rather than indulging in the speculative premise, Huang treats it as a conceptual scaffold to explore the ambiguous ethical terrain of authorship and emotional access. The writing is cool-toned and often oblique. As Enka drives closer to the nebulous edges of her own identity and Mathilde’s, the novel stays fixed on the discomfort of our porous selves and asymmetrical devotion.
It’s not every day that a biting literary satire lands among the best literary fiction picks from Reese’s Book Club, but “Yellowface” secured its place there in July 2023. R. F. Kuang’s provocative novel follows a struggling white writer who steals her dead friend’s unpublished manuscript and rebrands herself as “Juniper Song.” Who could have guessed she’d ride the stolen story all the way to literary stardom?
The manuscript in question is by Asian American friend Athena Liu, and is about Chinese laborers during World War I. June rebrands herself easily enough with a vaguely ethnic pen name and an updated author photo. The book is published and met with raucous acclaim, thus kicking off June’s transformation from floundering writer to literary fraud.
But success has a shadow, and June can’t outrun Athena’s ghost. As suspicions mount and her version of the truth begins to fray, “Yellowface” rises into a smart, fast-moving critique of cultural appropriation. Reese Witherspoon came at it full speed with her endorsement, declaring to her book club: “Clear your schedule because the moment you start reading you won’t be able to put it down.”
After a string of lofty literary fiction, this one serves up a different blend. “Vera Wong’s Unsolicited Advice for Murderers” offers a welcome tonal reset in the form of a cozy crime caper brimming with charm. When a dead body appears in her under-patronised San Francisco teashop, Vera — a formidable widow with a talent for meddling and a deep belief in the power of unsolicited wisdom — decides the investigation is far too important to be left merely to law enforcement.
The self-appointed sleuth brews her own approach to justice, quickly finding herself entangled in the case, as well as in the lives of those orbiting around the deceased. As suspects turn into confidantes and her shop transforms into an accidental sanctuary, it soon becomes clear there is power in spilling the tea — literally. If you find comfort in unlikely friendships and mysteries served with a side of oolong, you’re already showing signs you’ll love the cozy mystery genre.
This list was curated with a few key ingredients in mind. All the selections have been written by an author of Asian American or Pacific Islander heritage, and each has been published after 2020. We looked for books that have made an impression on readers, either earning a Goodreads rating above 4.0, or catching the attention of one of our favorite book clubs. Rest assured, every title justifies the space it takes up on your shelf and in your mind.
