Asian Heritage Month: Adult Books with Asian Protagonists
Arsenic and adobo
Manansala, Mia P., author
2021
When Lila Macapagal moves back home to recover from a horrible breakup, a notoriously nasty food critic (who happens to be her ex-boyfriend) drops dead moments after a confrontation with Lila, her life quickly swerves from a Nora Ephron romp to an Agatha Christie case. With the cops treating her like she's the one and only suspect, Lila's left with no choice but to conduct her own investigation. Armed with the nosy auntie network, her barista best bud, and her trusted Dachshund, Longanisa, Lila takes on this tasty, twisted case and soon finds her own neck on the chopping block.
Counterfeit : a novel
Chen, Kirstin, 1981- author
2022
Ava Wong has always played it safe. Enter Winnie Fang, Ava's enigmatic college roommate from Mainland China. Now, twenty years later, Winnie is looking to reconnect with her old friend. Winnie has developed an ingenious counterfeit scheme that involves importing near-exact replicas of luxury handbags and now she needs someone with a U.S. passport to help manage her business - someone who'd never be suspected of wrongdoing, someone like Ava. But when their spectacular success is threatened and Winnie vanishes once again, Ava is left to face the consequences.
Crying in H Mart : a memoir
Zauner, Michelle, author
2021
In this exquisite story of family, food, grief, and endurance, Michelle Zauner proves herself far more than a dazzling singer, songwriter, and guitarist. With humour and heart, she tells of growing up one of the few Asian American kids at her school in Eugene, Oregon; of a painful adolescence; of treasured months in Seoul, where she and her mother would bond over heaping plates of food. It was her mother's diagnosis of terminal cancer, when Michelle was twenty-five, that forced a reckoning with her identity and brought her to reclaim the gifts of taste, language, and history her mother had given her.
Daughter of the Moon Goddess : a novel
Tan, Sue Lynn, author
2022
Forced to flee her home on the moon after her magic flares up, Xingyin embarks on a perilous quest to save her mother, in a new fantasy novel inspired by the legend of the Chinese moon goddess.
Dial A for aunties : a novel
Sutanto, Jesse Q., author
2021
What happens when you mix 1 (accidental) murder with 2 thousand wedding guests, and then, toss in a possible curse on 3 generations of an immigrant Chinese-Indonesian family? You get 4 meddling Asian aunties coming to the rescue! When Meddelin Chan ends up accidentally killing her blind date, her meddlesome mother calls for her even more meddlesome aunties to help get rid of the body. Unfortunately, a dead body proves to be a lot more challenging to dispose of than one might anticipate-especially when it is accidentally shipped in a cake cooler to the over-the-top billionaire wedding that Meddy, her Ma, and her aunties are working, at an island resort on the California coastline. Is it possible to escape murder charges, charm her ex back into her life, and pull off a stunning wedding, all in one weekend?
Interior Chinatown
Yu, Charles, 1976- author
2020
Every day Chinatown resident Willis Wu enters the Golden Palace restaurant as a bit player in a theatrical production, but after stumbling into the spolight he is suddenly launched into a world that shows him the history of China and the legacy of his ownfamily and what it means for his place in America.
The kiss quotient
Hoang, Helen, author
2018
A thirty-year-old woman with Asperger's makes sense of her life using math, but one thing she can't handle is dating and the intimacy she feels it requires. Her conclusion: she needs lots of practice--with a professional. She hires the perfect male escort who teaches her that love is the best kind of logic.
The last story of Mina Lee
Kim, Nancy Jooyoun, author
2020
Margot Lee's mother isn't returning her calls. It's a mystery to twenty-six-year-old Margot, until she visits her childhood apartment in Koreatown and finds her mother dead under suspicious circumstances. The discovery sends Margot digging through the past, unraveling the facts of Mina's life as a Korean War orphan and undocumented immigrant, only to realize how little she truly knew about her mother.
The school for good mothers : a novel
Chan, Jessamine, author
2022
Frida Liu, a 39-year-old Chinese-American single mother in Philadelphia, loses custody of her 18-month-old daughter, Harriet, after she leaves Harriet home alone for two hours on one very bad day. To regain custody, Frida must spend a year at a newly-created institution, where she practices parenting with bad mothers from all over the county. There, she learns to love an uncannily life-like toddler girl doll in order to demonstrate her maternal instincts and prove to her family court judge that she deserves a second chance.
Yellowface : A Novel.
Kuang, R. F.
2023
Authors June Hayward and Athena Liu were supposed to be twin rising stars. But Athena's a cross-genre literary darling, and June didn't even get a paperback release. So when June witnesses Athena's death in a freak accident, she acts on impulse: she steals Athena's just-finished masterpiece, an experimental novel about the unsung contributions of Chinese labourers to the British and French war efforts during World War I. As June races to protect her secret, she discovers exactly how far she will go to keep what she thinks she deserves. Author of "Babel."