AAPI Heritage Month 2025

"Megan Kamalei Kakimoto's wrenching and sensational debut story collection follows a cast of mixed native Hawaiian and Japanese women through a contemporary landscape thick with inherited wisdom and the ghosts of colonization. This is a Hawai'i where unruly sexuality and generational memory overflow the postcard image of paradise and the boundaries of the real, where the superstitions born of the islands take on the weight of truth. A childhood encounter...

"In this spiky and hilarious 21st century reboot of the iconic film Taxi Driver, a ride share driver is barely holding it together on the hunt for love, dignity and a living wage . . . until she decides she's done waiting. Damani is tired. Her father just passed away and now she lives paycheck to paycheck in the basement of her parents' old house, caring for her mom, and driving for an app to (not even) pay the bills. Protests are all the rage--everybody's...

"Young Wang has received plenty of wisdom from his beloved uncle: don't take life too seriously, get out on the road when you can, and everyone gets just seven great loves in their life--so don't blow it. This last one sticks with Young as he is an obsessive cataloger of his life: movies watched, favorite albums . . . all filtered through Chinese numerology and superstition. He finds meaning in almost everything, for which his two best friends endlessly...

In 1917, deep in the snowy mountains of occupied Korea, an impoverished local hunter on the brink of starvation saves a young Japanese officer from an attacking tiger. In an instant, their fates are connected, and from this encounter unfolds a saga that spans half a century. In the aftermath, a young girl named Jade is sold by her family to Miss Silver's courtesan school, an act of desperation that will cement her place in the lowest social status....

"As a staff writer at a prestigious tech publication, the twenty-four-year-old narrator of Days of Distraction spends her days reporting on the achievements of smug Silicon Valley billionaires, while her own request for a raise gets bumped from manager to manager. When her long-time boyfriend, J, decides to move to upstate New York for grad school, she agrees to follow him, hoping to make a grand gesture of commitment and reshape her sense of self....

"The residents of Haven, Wisconsin, have dined on the Fine Chao restaurant's delicious Americanized Chinese food for thirty-five years, content to ignore any unsavory whispers about the family owners. Whether or not Big Leo Chao is honest, or his wife, Winnie, is happy, their food tastes good and their three sons earned scholarships to respectable colleges. But when the brothers reunite in Haven, the Chao family's secrets and simmering resentments...

"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. The discovery sends Margot digging through the past, unraveling the facts of Mina's life as a Korean War orphan and undocumented immigrant, only to realize how little she truly knew about her mother"--Dust jacket flap.

"Hi'i is proud to be a Naupaka, a family renowned for its contributions to hula and her hometown of Hilo, Hawaii, but there's a lot she doesn't understand. She's never met her legendary grandmother and her mother has never revealed the identity of her father. Worse, unspoken divides within her tight-knit community have started to grow, creating fractures whose origins are somehow entangled with her own family history. In hula, Hi'i sees a chance to...

"The next riveting mystery in the Tita Rosie's Kitchen series by Mia P. Manansala, Agatha Award-winning author of Arsenic and Adobo. Lila Macapagal's godmothers April, Mae, and June-AKA the Calendar Crew-are celebrating the opening of their latest joint business venture, a chain of laundromats. However, what should've been a joyous occasion quickly turns into a tragedy when they discover the body of Ninang April's niece, recently arrived from the...

"A rising movie star reunites with his high school prom date, now a personal stylist, in this delightful rom-com for fans of forced proximity, second chances, and celebrity romance. As a luxury fashion sales associate, Marley Kamal's livelihood depends on being cool, aspirational, and just the right amount of detached. None of her coworkers need to know she's been waiting years for a surgery date because she carries a BRCA genetic mutation. But only...