ASIAN-AMERICAN
STORIES
 
MYSTERIES AND HISTORICAL FICTION
Amnesty

by Aravind Adiga
 
A young undocumented immigrant in Sydney, Australia is forced to choose between reporting the murder of a female client--and risking deportation--or staying silent.
 
The Japanese Lover
 
by Isabel Allende
 
In 1939, as Poland falls under the shadow of the Nazis and the world goes to war, young Alma Belasco's parents send her away to live in safety with an aunt and uncle in their opulent mansion in San Francisco. There she meets Ichimei Fukuda, the son of the family's Japanese gardener, and between them a tender love blossoms.
 
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The Revolution According to Raymundo Mata

by Gina Apostol

Told in the form of a memoir, the novel traces Mata's childhood, his education in Manila, his love affairs, and his discovery of the books of the man who becomes the nation's great hero José Rizal,
 
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Daughter of Moloka'i

by Alan Brennert
 
A companion tale to Moloka'i tells the story of Ruth, the daughter that Rachel Kalama -- quarantined for most of her life at the isolated leprosy settlement of Kalaupapa -- was forced to give up at birth.
 
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America is Not the Heart

by Elaine Castillo

Presents a portrait of the Filipino diaspora, told through the lens of a single family. Revolving around Hero de Vera -- a former rebel (with the scars to prove it) turned au pair of sorts in Milpitas, California -- this is a book about identity but even more about standing up for something larger than oneself.
 
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Your House Will Pay

by Steph Cha
 
In the wake of the police shooting of a black teenager, Los Angeles is as tense as it's been since the unrest of the early 1990s. But Grace Park and Shawn Matthews have their own problems.

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Songs of Willow Frost

by Jamie Ford
 
Confined to Seattle's Sacred Heart Orphanage during the Great Depression, Chinese-American boy William Eng becomes convinced that a certain movie actress is actually the mother he has not seen since he was seven years old.

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Things We Didn't Say
 
by Amy Lynn Green
 
Headstrong Johanna Berglund, a linguistics student at the University of Minnesota, has very definite plans for her future . . . plans that do not include returning to her hometown and the secrets and heartaches she left behind there.
 
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The Parisian, or, Al-Barisi

by Isabella Hammad

Midhat Kamal is the son of a wealthy textile merchant from Nablus, a town in Ottoman Palestine. A dreamer, a romantic, an aesthete, in 1914 he leaves to study medicine in France, and falls in love. 
Newcomer
 
by Keigo Higashino
 
The girl at the rice cracker shop is probably the first to notice Kyochiro Kaga's novel approach to investigation. Rather than focusing on the crime scene in Kodenmacho where Mineko Mitsui was found strangled in her apartment, Kaga begins by looking at the rhythms of the street.
 
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The Last Story of Mina Lee

by Nancy Jooyoun Kim
 
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.

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The Translation of Love

by Lynne Kutsukake

Deported back to post-war Japan with her father after their release from a Canadian internment camp, thirteen-year-old Aya Shimamura struggles at school, where she is bullied for being foreign.
Pachinko
 
by Min Jin Lee

Follows one Korean family through the generations, beginning in early 1900s Korea with Sunja, the prized daughter of a poor yet proud family, whose unplanned pregnancy threatens to shame them all.
 
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Fifty Words for Rain
 
by Asha Lemmie
 
"If a woman knows nothing else, she should know how to be silent. ...Do not question. Do not fight. Do not resist." Such is eight-year-old Noriko "Nori" Kamiza's first lesson. She will not question why her mother abandoned her with only these final words
 
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The Last Year of the War

by Susan Meissner
 
A quietly devastating story that shows how fear and hatred during World War II changed (and even ended) the lives of many innocent Americans.
 
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Paper Son

by S. J. Rozan
 
Lydia Chin's formidable mother, who's never approved of her work as a private eye, packs her off to the Mississippi Delta for the best and worst reasons. The first time Lydia ever hears of her cousin Jefferson Tam is when her mother tells her that he's been arrested for stabbing his father, Leland, ne Lo-Liang, to death.

 
The Tea Girl of Hummingbird Lane

by Lisa See

Li-yan and her family align their lives around the seasons and the farming of tea. There is ritual and routine, and it has been ever thus for generations. Then one day a jeep appears at the village gate -- the first automobile any of them have seen -- and a stranger arrives.
 
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Bangkok Wakes to Rain

by Pitchaya Sudbanthad

A house in flooded Bangkok reflects a confluence of lives shaped by upheaval, from a homesick missionary doctor, to a haunted jazz pianist in the age of rock, to a woman who would escape her political past.
The Color of Air

by Gail Tsukiyama
 
A gorgeous and evocative historical novel about a Japanese-American family set against the backdrop of Hawai'i's sugar plantations.
 
Seventeen
 
by Hideo Yokoyama

Yokoyama worked as a newspaper reporter for years before leaving to write thrillers, and here he recalls a tale straight from the headlines: the crash, then the world's deadliest, of an airplane on a mountain.