May is Asian Pacific American Heritage Month. This celebration of Asian Pacific cultures was originally established by President Carter in 1979 as Asian Pacific American Heritage Week. In 1990, Congress expanded the celebration to create Asian Pacific American Heritage Month. This month, the Library invites you to participate by checking out some of the incredible titles by Asian Pacific authors in our collection.
Noontide Toll, Romesh Gunesekera
The 2015 Marino Family International Writers Workshop title, Noontide Toll, is a collection of linked stories set in post-war Sri Lanka. The stories are narrated by Vasantha, an intrepid Sri Lankan who retired early, bought a van with his savings, and now makes a living as a driver for hire. On his journey from the army camps in northern Jaffna to the moonlit ramparts of Galle, in the south, Vasantha begins to discover the depth of the problems of the past—his own and his country’s—and the promise the future might hold.
Exit West: A Novel, Mohsin Hamid
Exit West: A Novel is a love story that unfolds in a world being irrevocably transformed by migration. In a country teetering on the brink of civil war, two young people meet. They embark on a furtive love affair, thrust into premature intimacy by the unrest roiling their city. When it explodes, turning familiar streets into a patchwork of checkpoints and bomb blasts, they begin to hear whispers about doors that can whisk people far away, if perilously and for a price. As violence and the threat of violence escalate, Nadia and Saeed decide that they no longer have a choice. Leaving their homeland and their old lives behind, they find a door and step through.
Beauty is a Wound, Eka Kurniawan
This title is the English-language debut of Indonesia's greatest young novelist, Eka Kurniawan. One afternoon on a weekend in May, Dewi Ayu rises from her grave after being dead for twenty-one years. So begins Beauty Is a Wound, an epic, compulsively readable novel, combining history, satire, family tragedy, legend, humor, and romance in a sweeping polyphony.
On Such a Full Sea, Chang-Rae Lee
On Such a Full Sea is a highly provocative, deeply affecting story of one woman's legendary quest in a fictional America. Fan leaves her home in the B-Mor settlement (once known as Baltimore) when the man she loves mysteriously disappears.
How I Became a North Korean, Krys Lee
Three disparate lives converge when three teenagers flee their homes, finding themselves in a small Chinese town just across the river from North Korea. As they fight to survive in a place where danger seems to close in on all sides, in the form of government informants, husbands, thieves, abductors, and even missionaries, they come to form a kind of adoptive family. But will they find their way to the better lives for which they risked everything?
Kinder Than Solitude, Yiyun Li
Set in today's America and China in the 1990s, this tale follows the experiences of three people who, in their youths were involved in a mysterious accident that resulted in a friend's fatal poisoning, and years later are haunted by the possibility that one of them actually committed a murder.
Everything I Never Told You, Celeste Ng
Lydia is the favorite child of Marilyn and James Lee, and her parents are determined that she will fulfill the dreams they were unable to pursue. But when Lydia’s body is found in the local lake, the delicate balancing act that has been keeping the Lee family together is destroyed, tumbling them into chaos. A profoundly moving story of family, secrets, and longing, Everything I Never Told You is both a gripping page-turner and a sensitive family portrait, uncovering the ways in which mothers and daughters, fathers and sons, and husbands and wives struggle, throughout their lives, to understand one another.
The Sympathizer, Viet Thanh Nguyen
This 2015 debut novel by Vietnamese-American professor Viet Thanh Nguyen received the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. The novel follows a Viet Cong agent as he spies on a South Vietnamese army general and his compatriots as they start a new life in 1975 Los Angeles.
The Year of the Runaways, Sunjeev Sahota
The Year of the Runaways unfolds over the course of one shattering year in which the destinies of four characters become irreversibly entwined—a year in which they are forced to rely on one another in ways they never could have foreseen, and a year in which their hopes of breaking free of the past are decimated by the punishing realities of immigrant life. The novel was shortlisted for the 2015 Man Booker Prize and was awarded a European Union Prize for Literature in 2017.
Do Not Say We Have Nothing, Madeleine Thien
Last year’s Marino Family International Writers Workshop title, Do Not Say We Have Nothing, is an epic novel about the far-reaching effects of China's revolutionary history, told through the stories of two interlinked musical families, from the 1940s to the present day. Critically acclaimed, in 2016 the author was awarded both the Scotiabank Giller Prize and the Governor General's Award for this novel.