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Multicultural Authors Dec 2025--Jan 2026 |
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Love Forms
by Claire Adam
For much of her life, Dawn has felt as if something had been missing. Now, at the age of fifty-eight, with a divorce behind her and her two grown-up sons busy with their own lives, she should be trying to settle into a new future for herself. But she keeps returning to the past and to the secret she's kept all these years: at just sixteen, Dawn found herself pregnant, and--as was common in Trinidad back then--her parents sent her away to have the baby and give her up for adoption. More than forty years later, Dawn yearns to reconnect with her lost daughter. But tracking down her child is not as easy as she had thought.
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Sweet Heat
by Bolu Babalola
Twenty-eight-year-old Kiki Banjo hosts the popular podcast The HeartBeat, solving romantic conundrums and dishing out life advice. Behind the scenes, though, career setbacks and a devastating breakup have left her hanging on by a thread. As she's preparing to be the maid of honor in her best friend's wedding, everything starts to unravel, and Kiki is left wondering if she ever had the answers. Then Kiki finds herself face-to-face with the best man, her ex-boyfriend, Malakai--the smooth-talking, absurdly handsome, annoyingly perceptive man who stole her heart and then shattered it. While Kiki's approaching rock bottom, Malakai's been on the rise as a filmmaker, and now they have no choice but to play nice until the wedding is over.
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Malinalli
by Veronica Chapa
An imaginative retelling of the triumphs and sorrows of one of the most controversial and misunderstood women in Mexico's history and mythology.
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Flashlight
by Susan Choi
A thrilling, globe-spanning novel on memory, identity, and what it means to be in a family (and to lose one), from the award-winning author of Trust Exercise.
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The Art of Legend
by Wesley Chu
Once in a faraway kingdom there was a man prophesied to be the Chosen One, who would defeat a great villain, the Eternal Khan, and save the kingdom. But then the Eternal Khan died ... and the prophecy was broken. For Jian, the fated hero, this could have been a moment to succumb to despair. But instead, he chose to create his own destiny. He studied under Taishi, his curmudgeonly but beloved mentor, to become a great warrior. With war on the horizon--and rumors of the Khan's return brewing--a band of unlikely allies are also on their own missions. There's Sali, a gruff warrior who is also forging a path different from the one her culture created for her, and Qisami, an assassin whose cold heart might actually be made of gold. And Taishi has gathered a band of other elderly grandmasters to help Jian live up to his destiny. Because some heroes aren't simply born legends-they choose to become legendary. And great heroes do not stand alone, but are stronger together.
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The Lost Story of Eva Fuentes
by Chanel Cleeton
London, 2024: American expat Margo Reynolds is renowned for her talent at sourcing rare antiques for her clients, but she's never had a request quite like this one. She's been hired to find a mysterious book published over a century ago. With a single copy left in existence, it has a storied past shrouded in secrecy--and her client isn't the only person determined to procure it at any cost. Havana, 1966: Librarian Pilar Castillo has devoted her life to books, and in the chaotic days following her husband's unjust imprisonment by Fidel Castro, reading is her only source of solace. So when a neighbor fleeing Cuba asks her to return a valuable book to its rightful owner, Pilar will risk everything to protect the literary work entrusted to her care. It's a dangerous mission that reveals to her the power of one book to change a life. Boston, 1900: For Cuban school teacher and aspiring author Eva Fuentes, traveling from Havana to Harvard to study for the summer is the opportunity of a lifetime. It's a whirlwind adventure that leaves her little time to write, but a moonlit encounter with an enigmatic stranger changes everything. The story that pours out of her is one of forbidden love, secrets, and lies... and though Eva cannot yet see it, the book will be a danger and salvation for the lives it touches.
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Old School Indian
by Aaron John Curtis
Abe Jacobs is Kanien'kehá ka from Ahkwesáhsneor, as white people say, a Mohawk Indian from the Saint Regis Tribe. At eighteen, Abe left the reservation where he was raised and never looked back. He met the love of his life, started writing poetry, and began an open marriage. Now at forty-three, Abe is suffering from a rare disease, one his doctors in Miami believe will kill him. Running from his diagnosis and a marriage teetering on collapse, Abe returns to the Rez, where he's persuaded to undergo a healing at the hands of his Great Uncle Budge. But Budge, a wry, recovered alcoholic prone to wearing punk T-shirts, isn't all that convincing. And Abe's time off the Rez has made him a thorough skeptic. To heal, Abe will undertake a revelatory journey, confronting the parts of himself he's hidden ever since he left home and wrestling with the imprint left by his once-passionate marriage. Delivered with crackling wit and heart-wrenching tenderness, Old School Indian is a striking exploration of the power and secrets of family, the capacity for healing and intimacy, and the ripple effects of history and culture.
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Bochica
by Carolina Flórez-Cerchiaro
In 1923 Soacha, Colombia, La Casona--an opulent mansion perched above the legendary Salto del Tequendama waterfall--was once home to Antonia and her family, who settle in despite their constant nightmares and the house's malevolent spirit. But tragedy strikes when Antonia's mother takes a fatal fall into El Salto and her father, consumed by grief, attempts to burn the house down with Antonia still inside. Three years later, haunted by disturbing dreams and cryptic journal entries from her late mother, Antonia is drawn back to her childhood home when it is converted into a luxurious hotel. As Antonia confronts her fragmented memories and the dark history of the estate, she wrestles with unsettling questions she can no longer ignore: Was her mother's death by her own hand, or was it by someone else?
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The Wilderness
by Angela Flournoy
An era-defining novel about five Black women over the course of their twenty-year friendship, as they move through the dizzying and sometimes precarious period between young adulthood and midlife--in the much-anticipated second book from National Book Award finalist Angela Flournoy.
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Fireweed
by Lauren Haddad
Fireweed is a subversion of the missing woman plot that follows a white housewife's misguided investigation into the disappearance of her Indigenous neighbor.
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Seesaw Monster
by Kotaro Isaka
From the international bestselling author of Bullet Train, two inventive espionage tales in one Isaka's style is tense, laden with dark humor expressed with a flat affect--just the right tone for a book that walks the fine line between comedy and violence.
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Bad Bad Girl
by Gish Jen
Gish's mother--Loo Shu-hsin--is born in 1925 to a wealthy Shanghai family where girls are expected to behave and be quiet. Every act of disobedience prompts the same reprimand: 'Bad bad girl! You don't know how to talk!' She gets sent to Catholic school, where she is baptized, re-named for St. Agnes, and, unusually for a girl, given an internationally-minded education. Still, her father would say, 'Too bad. If you were a boy, you could accomplish a lot.' Aggie finds solace in books, reading every night with a flashlight and an English-Chinese dictionary, before announcing her intention to pursue a Ph.D in America. ... Lonely and adrift in Manhattan, Aggie begins dating Chao-Pei, an engineering student also from Shanghai. While news of their country and their families grows increasingly dire, they set out to make a new life together: marriage, a number one son, a small house in the suburbs. By the time Gish is born, her parents' marriage is unraveling, and her mother, struggling to understand her strong-willed American daughter, is repeating the refrain that punctuated her own childhood.
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The Sisters
by Jonas Hassen Khemiri
A family saga about the lives of three sisters and a narrator named Jonas, spanning three decades and three continents.
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The Phoenix Pencil Company
by Allison King
In this dazzling debut novel, a hidden and nearly forgotten magic--of Reforging pencils, bringing the memories they contain back to life--holds the power to transform a young woman's relationship with her grandmother, and to mend long-lost connections across time and space.
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The Dream Hotel
by Laila Lalami
Sara has just landed at LAX, returning home from a conference abroad, when agents from the Risk Assessment Administration pull her aside and inform her that she will soon commit a crime. Using data from her dreams, the RAA's algorithm has determined that she is at imminent risk of harming the person she loves most: her husband. For his safety, she must be kept under observation for twenty-one days. The agents transfer Sara to a retention center, where she is held with other dreamers, all of them women trying to prove their innocence from different crimes. With every deviation from the strict and ever-shifting rules of the facility, their stay is extended. Months pass and Sara seems no closer to release. Then one day, a new resident arrives, disrupting the order of the facility and leading Sara on a collision course with the very companies that have deprived her of her freedom.
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Guatemalan Rhapsody : Stories
by Jared Lemus
A collection of stories where characters each face pivotal choices that test their loyalties including orphaned brothers posing as highway robbers, a tattoo artist competing for love and a self-styled Don Juan caught in a film crew's upheaval.
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The Tiny Things Are Heavier
by Esther Ifesinachi Okonkwo
A heart-rending debut novel about a Nigerian immigrant as she tries to find her place at home and in America-a powerful epic about love, grief, family, and belonging.
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Lore of the Tides
by Analeigh Sbrana
Lore Alemeyu wakes up to discover she's on a ship in the middle of the ocean. Held prisoner and with no way to escape, she's faced with a dire set of circumstances... A crew that's distrustful of Lore's magic capabilities... Her betrayal by a Fae she thought she could trust... A dangerous quest for the sun book, which, if placed in the wrong hands, will make the Alytherian Fae even more powerful. Lore must navigate threats on the ship and beyond, into the ocean's magical and mysterious depths, in order to find the sun book herself and help free the humans. All the while, Lore can't help but feel the intense pull of one Fae male who has been helping her all along. But is she willing to risk her human heart for creatures that have burned her in the past, and jeopardize her people's future?
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The Emperor of Gladness
by Ocean Vuong
Ocean Vuong returns with a bighearted novel about chosen family, unexpected friendship, and the stories we tell ourselves in order to survive.
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Sunbirth
by An Yu
From the celebrated author of Ghost Music and Braised Pork, a bewitching and atmospheric novel following two sisters in an isolated village as the sun begins to diminish above them.
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Contact Your Librarian for More Great Reads |
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Centerville Library
111 W. Spring Valley Rd
Centerville, OH 45458
(937) 433-8091
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Woodbourne Library
6060 Far Hills Ave Centerville, OH 45459
(937) 435-3700
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Creativity Commons
895 Miamisburg Centerville Rd
Centerville, OH 45459
(937) 610-4425
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