Asian-American Fiction

Troublemaker and Other Saints by Christina Chiu
In Troublemaker and Other Saints, the life of one character weaves into that of another and then another, as unlikely figures are brought face to face, strengthening and illuminating one another in surprising ways. But who are the troublemakers? Who are the saints?

The Foreign Student by Susan Choi
The Foreign Student is the story of a young Korean man, scarred by war and the deeply troubled daughter of a wealthy Southern American family. Without quite knowing why, these two outsiders are drawn together, each sensing in the other the possibility of salvation.

The Mistress of Spices by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
Magical, tantalizing and sensual, The Mistress of Spices tells the story of Tilo, a young woman born in another time in a faraway place who is trained in the ancient art of spices. When Tilo – disguised in the gnarled body of an old woman – travels to present-day Oakland, California, an unexpected romance with a handsome stranger forces her to choose between the supernatural life of an immortal and the vicissitudes of modern life.

Sister Of My Heart by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
From the award-winning author of "Mistress of Spices" comes the bestselling novel, now in paperback, about the bond between two women and the family secrets and romantic jealousies that threaten to tear them apart.

Inheritance by Indira Ganesan
In her first novel since her debut with The Journey, Indira Ganesan gives us the story of Sonil, who at 15 has come to her adored grandmother's house on a paradisaical island off the coast of India ("a tiny eye, to the teardrop that was Sri Lanka") to mend her shaky health. She has been living on the mainland with her aunts, to whom she was sent by her mother when she was a baby and she yearns to find out why she was exiled and where her American father might be. Little by little, her spirits revive, and we see Sonil begin to move out of the magical world of her grandmother's compound into the wider life of the island, until she finds the perfect escape from her mother's reflection in a passionate affair with a young American. It is through her feelings for him that she begins to discover the means to forgive her mother and to look to herself for the answers she will need in the coming years.

In Full Bloom by Caroline Hwang
An original voice from the wicked world of glossy magazines makes her fiction debut in a novel that packs the fun of a chic woman's quest for love and fulfillment into a poignant immigrant's tale.

Typical American by Gish Jen
Yifeng has come to America to study to be an engineer and then return to China. But soon his name is Ralph Chang and he has been joined by his ambitious sister, Theresa. She in turn finds him a perfect wife in beautiful and docile Helen. Together they set out to make the American dream come true in every way: making money in fast food, buying a bargain house in the suburbs, pursuing excursions into adultery. Theirs is the story of a family coming together and coming apart and of miracles real and imagined, as Gish Jen puts her unique stamp on the American dream in this astonishingly accomplished debut.

Mona In The Promised Land by Gish Jen
The author of Typical Americans sets readers' notions of cultural diversity and ethnic identity spinning in Mona in the Promised Land. Moving to Scarshill, New York, with her newly prosperous family, Mona Chang discovers that, in 1968, the Chinese have become the "new Jews."

The Interpreter by Suki Kim
A striking first novel about the dark side of the American dream. Suzy Park is a 29-year-old Korean American interpreter for the New York City court system. Young, attractive and achingly alone, she makes a startling and ominous discovery during one court case that forever alters her family's history.

Obasan by Joy Kogawa
Based on the author's own experiences, this story of the evacuation, relocation and dispersal of Canadian citizens of Japanese ancestry during WWII is "a tour de force, a deeply felt novel, brilliantly poetic in its sensibility.

A Gesture Life by Chang-rae Lee
From the acclaimed author of Native Speaker comes his second novel about a Japanese World War II veteran who becomes a proper man and upstanding citizen in New York.

Native Speaker by Chang-rae Lee
In Native Speaker, author Chang-rae Lee introduces readers to Henry Park. Park has spent his entire life trying to become a true American – a native speaker. But even as the essence of his adopted country continues to elude him, his Korean heritage seems to drift further and further away.

China Boy by Gus Lee
A young, American-born child of an aristocratic Mandarin family that has fled China struggles to assimilate in 1950s San Francisco in a novel from an incredibly rich and new voice.

The Middle Heart by Bette Bao Lord
In 1932, as China shamefully kowtows under Japanese occupation, three unlikely companions are fatefully bound by their steadfast patriotism: Steel Hope, heir to a once-great aristocracy; Mountain Pine, his crippled, scholarly servant; and Firecrackers, a poor gravekeeper's daughter. In a youthful pact, they call themselves "Brothers of the Middle Heart," vowing to defend their country to the end.

The Bride's Kimono by Sujata Massey
An antiques business owner finds herself involved with stolen artifacts, a wacky group of Japanese tourists and one very dead body when she transports a set of priceless kimonos.

Jasmine by Bharati Mukherjee
When Jasmine is suddenly widowed at 17, she seems fated to a life of quiet isolation in the small Indian village where she was born. But the force of Jasmine's desires propels her explosively into a larger, more dangerous and ultimately more life-giving world. In just a few years, Jasmine becomes Jane Ripplemeyer, happily pregnant by a middle-aged Iowa banker and the adoptive mother of a Vietnamese refugee.

Leave It To Me by Bharati Mukherjee (1997)
Debby DiMartino: saved from death in infancy by Gray Nuns at an Indian desert outpost; adopted as a toddler by Manfred and Serena DiMartino of Schenectady, New York; coming of age an inherently exotic girl in an inherently American town, never sure if she was someone special or just a special kind of misfit. Now, at 23, she's decided that it's time to find out: time to track down her biological parents.

All Over Creation by Ruth L. Ozeki
From the author of My Year of Meats comes a dramatic story of a prodigal daughter's homecoming to a heartland of genetically modified crops.

My Year Of Meats by Ruth L. Ozeki
Jane Takagi-Little, by trade a documentary filmmaker, by nature a truth seeker, is "racially half," Japanese and American and, as she tells us, "neither here nor there." Jane is sharp-edged, desperate for a job and determined not to fall in love again. Akiko Ueno, a young Japanese housewife, lives with her husband in a bleak high-rise apartment complex in a suburb of Tokyo. Akiko is so thin her bones hurt and her husband, an ad agency salaryman who wants her to get pregnant, is insisting that she put some meat on them – literally.

The Golden Gate by Vikram Seth
While the idea of a novel in verse may be initially off-putting, readers of this tour de force are in for a treat. Using the sonnet form throughout and varying his language from lyrical elegance to timely vernacular, Seth's tale of four California Yuppies is as fully dimensional as a good novel and twice as diverting.

A Suitable Boy by Vikram Seth
Opening and closing with a wedding, this novel is ostensibly the story of a Hindu family trying to find a suitable husband for their younger daughter, Lata. Who will the suitable boy turn out to be? The dashing Kabir, with whom Lata falls in love? The ambitious businessman whom Lata's mother favors? Or the sophisticated poet her relatives choose? The interwoven stories of four families linked by marriage form the background for this marital quest.

The Bonesetter's Daughter by Amy Tan
Set in contemporary San Francisco and in a Chinese village where Peking Man is unearthed, The Bonesetter's Daughter is an excavation of the human spirit: the past, its deepest wounds, its most profound hopes. This is the story of LuLing Young, who searches for the name of her mother, the daughter of the famous Bonesetter from the Mouth of the Mountain. The story conjures the pain of broken dreams, the power of myths and the strength of love that enables us to recover in memory what we have lost in grief.

The Hundred Secret Senses by Amy Tan
Amy Tan's latest effort unfolds a series of family secrets that questions the connection between fate, beliefs, hopes, memory and imagination and the natural gifts of our hundred secret senses. Years after her Chinese half-sister assails her with ghost stories set in the mysterious world of Yin, a young woman finds herself in China, looking for a way to reconcile the ghosts of her past with the dreams of her future. The Hundred Secret Senses doesn't simply return to a world but burrows more deeply into it, following new trails to fresh revelations.

The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan
In 1949 four Chinese women – drawn together by the shadow of their past – begin meeting in San Francisco to play mah jong, invest in stocks, eat dim sum and 'say' stories. They call their gathering the Joy Luck Club.

The Kitchen God's Wife by Amy Tan
Bestselling author creates an absorbing story about the lives of a Chinese mother and her adult American-born daughter. Pressured to reveal to the young woman her secret past in war-torn China in the 1940s, Winnie weaves an unbelievable account of a childhood of loneliness and abandonment and a young adulthood marred by a nightmarish arranged marriage.