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Our current favourite books by Asian American authors
Whether you like dramatic stories from Indian households or want to explore the perils of immigrants, these stories will move you.
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Nandika Chand - Wed, 02, Apr 2025
- 23:54 EDT
- 222
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Covers of books written by South Asian authors / Penguin Random House, Ballantine Books, Chatto & Windus, Riverhead Books, Macmillan Publishers
From personal memoirs to prejudices, and reimagined histories, Asian American writers are leaving their mark on readers across the world. Whether you like dramatic stories from Indian households or want to explore the perils of immigrants, these stories will surely move you.
Here’s a curated list of books by New India Abroad that have gripping themes, depth, and most of all, great storytelling:
Speak, Okinawa – A Memoir
By Elizabeth Miki Brina
This is a ‘hauntingly beautiful memoir about family and identity’ (NPR) and a young woman’s journey to understanding her complicated parents – her mother an Okinawan war bride, her father a Vietnam veteran – and her own, fraught cultural heritage.
Song of the Exile
By Kiana Davenport
‘Song of the Exile’ follows the fortunes of the Meahuna family and the odyssey of one resilient man searching for his soul mate after she is torn from his side by the forces of war. From the turbulent years of World War II through Hawaii’s complex journey of statehood, this story presents a cast of richly imagined characters who rise up magnificent and forceful, redeemed by the spiritual power and the awesome beauty of their islands.
Fasting, Feasting
By Anita Desai
This is a novel that moves from the heart of a close-knit Indian household with restrictions and prejudices, to the cool centre of an American family, with its freedom and strangely self-denying attitudes to eating. In both, it is ultimately the women who suffer, whether paradoxically, from a surfeit of feasting and family life in India, or from self-denial and starvation in the US, or both.
How Much of These Hills Is Gold
By C Pam Zhang
Both epic and intimate, blending Chinese symbolism and reimagined history with fiercely original language and storytelling, ‘How Much of These Hills Is Gold’ is both a haunting adventure story and an unforgettable sibling story. On a broad level, it explores race in an expanding country and the question of where immigrants are allowed to belong. But page by page, its about the memories that bind and divide families, and the yearning for home.
Ma and Me – A Memoir
By Putsata Reang
In her startling memoir, Putsata Reang explores the long legacy of inherited trauma and the crushing weight of cultural and filial duty. With rare clarity and lyric wisdom, ‘Ma and Me’ is a stunning, deeply moving memoir about love, debt and duty.
Sour Heart
By Jenny Zhang
Narrated by the daughters of Chinese immigrants who fled imperiled lives as artists back home only to struggle to stay afloat, dumpster diving for food and scamming Atlantic City casino buses to make buck, these stories reflect Jenny Zhang’s compassion, moral courage, and a perverse sense of humour. A dark, funny and intimate rendering of girlhood, ‘Sour Heart’ examines what it means to belong to a family, to find your home, leave it, reject it, and return again.
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