Asian American and Pacific Islander Historical Fiction for AAPI Heritage Month

A Chinese American family tries to make it in the Old West as prospectors turned coal miners even as they’re constantly made to feel like outsiders. The story is told masterfully and out of order, beginning with siblings Lucy and Sam setting out to the hills to bury their father’s body and then traveling back in time to reveal their childhood and how their Ba and Ma first met. It’s a stunning work of historical fiction that I can’t recommend enough.

This National Book Award winning novel follows a seventeen-year-old girl living in San Francisco’s Chinatown in the age of McCarthyism. Not only is her father’s hard won citizenship in danger due to anti-Chinese sentiment, but Lily’s burgeoning feelings for her friend and exploration of lesbian night clubs like The Telegraph Club put her–and her family–in an even more precarious position in a time when not dressing feminine enough could get you arrested.

Eight young Japanese women make the arduous journey by boat to San Francisco where they will become “picture brides.” Each section highlights a different woman, following them through marriage, birth, and the arrival of a war that alienates them even further.

Family matriarch Pono weaves an epic tale of her family and Hawaii’s history for her four granddaughters, all of mixed heritage. It’s a story of triumph and tragedy, equal parts personal and political, that finally helps Pono’s granddaughters understand their heritage and their place in the world.

Told in a collection of stories to give voice to the many young people affected, We Are Not Free follows fourteen teens who grew up together in the lead-up to WWII and are now being forced into incarceration camps in the country they were born and raised in. In a society determined to hate and suspect them, this group of second-generation Japanese Americans must band together to create community even as racism and injustice threaten to tear them apart.

You’ll have to wait a little longer to read this book, but now’s as good a time as any to add it to your TBR. In 1918, Willow leaves her home in Korea to journey to Hawaii as a picture bride. She arrives, only to find her new husband didn’t want to marry her in the first place and the Hawaiian Korean community is divided over Korea’s burgeoning independence movement. If she wants to create the life of opportunity and plenty the matchmaker promised her, it’s clear she’ll have to forge it for herself.

Release: October 11, 2022