AAPI FICTION

"Would you hire someone to be the best man at your wedding? Your stand-in brother? Your husband? In Kat Tang's exciting and resonant debut, a "Rental Stranger"--a companion hired under various guises--walks the line between personal and professional in surprising new ways. Five-Star Stranger follows a man who is a top-rated performer on the "Rental Stranger" app, where users can hire a pretend fiancé, Referred to only as Stranger, the narrator navigates...

"Manchuria, 1908. In the last years of the dying Qing Empire, a courtesan is found frozen in a doorway. Her death is clouded by rumors of foxes, which are believed to lure people by transforming themselves into beautiful women and handsome men. Bao, a detective with an uncanny ability to sniff out the truth, is hired to uncover the dead woman's identity. Since childhood, Bao has been intrigued by the fox gods, yet they've remained tantalizingly out...

"Business has never been better for Nura Khan, a third-generation matchmaker in Atlanta. Her exclusive clientele benefits from her impeccable track record. And while a single thirty-one-year-old matchmaker would normally raise some perfectly threaded eyebrows in the community, Nura's childhood best friend, Azar, is willing to double as her pretend fiancé at her clients' weddings-even though Nura's feelings for him might not be so pretend. But all...

Ocean Vuong returns with a bighearted novel about chosen family, unexpected friendship, and the stories we tell ourselves in order to survive. One late summer evening in the post-industrial town of East Gladness, Connecticut, nineteen-year-old Hai stands on the edge of a bridge in pelting rain, ready to jump, when he hears someone shout across the river. The voice belongs to Grazina, an elderly widow succumbing to dementia, who convinces him to take...

"In the spring of 1972, twelve-year-old Tomoko leaves her mother behind in Tokyo and boards a train alone for Ashiya, a coastal town in Japan, to stay with her aunt's family. Tomoko's aunt is an enigma and an outlier in her working-class family, and her magnificent home-and handsome, foreign husband, the president of a soft drink company-are symbols of that status. The seventeen rooms are filled with German-made furnishings; there are sprawling gardens...

Moving between late 1990s small-town Texas to pre-World War II Japan and occupied Tokyo, an emotionally engaging literary debut about a grandmother and granddaughter who connect over a beloved lost place and the secrets they both carry. It's spring 1999, and 25-year-old Lia Cope and her prickly 73-year-old grandmother, Mineko, are sharing a bedroom in Curtain, Texas, the ranching town where Lia grew up and Mineko began her life as a Japanese war bride....

Follows Josiah Chang, a Chinese Canadian who, barred from military service, works in a shipyard and falls in love with Poppy; as their romance blossoms, Josiah seeks to prove his worth to her family and himself, leading him to enlist in Toronto amid the changing dynamics of wartime Canada.

"From the award-winning author of Flux comes a dazzling novel about love, family, and the art of sushi that asks: What if you could return to the point of a fateful choice, wiser than before, and find the courage to forge a new path?"-- Provided by publisher. A coma can change a man, but the world Jack Jr. awakens to is one he barely recognizes. His advertising job is history, his Manhattan apartment is gone, and the love of his life has left him...

"Hannah, a Korean American girl from Queens, New York, and Angel, a Puerto Rican boy from Brooklyn, fall in love in the spring of 1993. Hannah, who comes from a strict Korean home, meets Angel, a free and beautiful boy, at a quinceañera: Beyond flushed, sweating bodies pushed, pushing like cattle below black & buzzing speakers, under a torn pink streamer loose as a tendril of hair--lush-- his eyes. Darkluminous. Warm. A blush floods her. Hannah sucks...

"From the author of The Calligrapher's Daughter comes the riveting story of two sisters, one raised in the United States, the other in South Korea, and the family that bound them together even as the Korean War kept them apart. In 1948 Najin and Calvin Cho, with their young daughter Miran, travel from South Korea to the United States in search of new opportunities. Wary of the challenges they know will face them, Najin and Calvin make the difficult...