my 30 favorite books written by Asian women
happy AAPI month!
Growing up, my bookshelves and English class syllabi were filled almost exclusively with works by white men and, if I got lucky, occasionally white women. I was always reading, devouring books hungrily, but rarely saw reflections of my own experiences or cultural heritage in what I read.
These 30 novels, memoirs, and short story collections by Asian and Asian diaspora women represent the literary landscape I wish had been available to me as a young reader searching for stories that might help me make sense of my identity.
From Tokyo to Kerala, Seoul to New York, these books span continents and generations, offering insights into experiences both vastly different from my own and startlingly familiar…
Enjoy! x
1. A Tale for the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki
Nao is a teenage girl in Tokyo who's being brutally bullied and decides to document her 104-year-old Zen Buddhist great-grandmother's life before she considers ending her own. Meanwhile, across the ocean, a novelist named Ruth finds Nao's diary washed up inside a Hello Kitty lunchbox after the 2011 tsunami. Ozeki explores how readers and writers form intimate bonds across impossible distances of time and space. Nao's diary, found by novelist Ruth, becomes a meditation on what it means to be a "time being…" both existing in time and being fully present in each moment. How do our stories continue beyond our physical lives? The novel weaves together Zen Buddhism, quantum physics, environmental catastrophe, and internet-age alienation to question our understanding of time itself. Nao's voice feels startlingly immediate, collapsing the distance between writer and reader.
What responsibilities do we bear as witnesses to others' suffering? The novel suggests that the act of reading itself might be a form of salvation, creating connection in an increasingly fragmented world.
2. Severance by Ling Ma
This apocalyptic satire follows Candace Chen, a millennial office worker who continues her routine even as a fungal infection called Shen Fever devastates civilization. What does it mean to mindlessly follow routines until death? Ma brilliantly parallels zombie-like behavior with the monotony of capitalism and immigrant striving. Candace's parents came to America from China with dreams of reinvention, but what happens when the American dream itself becomes a kind of fever? The novel questions our attachment to nostalgia, memory, and material possessions in a world that's literally falling apart.
How much of our identity is tied to the work we do? What rituals are worth preserving when everything collapses? Its exploration of isolation feels eerily prescient, as Candace ultimately must choose between comfortable repetition and risky human connection.
3. Natural Beauty by Ling Ling Huang
This eerie novel follows a young pianist who abandons her musical ambitions and starts working at a mysterious wellness company called Aphrodite. The products promise eternal youth and beauty, but at what cost? Ma's protagonist slowly transforms herself both physically and psychologically as she becomes absorbed into this cult-like beauty establishment. The story brilliantly explores the commodification of beauty, especially for Asian women, and the crushing pressures to conform.
What parts of ourselves do we sacrifice in pursuit of acceptance? How does the beauty industry prey on our insecurities? The novel's unsettling atmosphere intensifies as the protagonist's humanity is slowly stripped away, raising questions about authenticity, assimilation, and the high price of perfection. Ma's writing is clinically precise yet deeply unsettling.
4. The Memory Police by Yoko Ogawa
On an unnamed island, objects disappear not just physically but from people's memories too: birds, roses, photographs, boats. The Memory Police enforce these disappearances, making sure no one remembers. What happens when our connections to the material world are systematically erased? Ogawa's novel is a haunting meditation on loss, authoritarianism, and the fragility of memory itself. The protagonist, a novelist, attempts to hide her editor (who mysteriously retains all memories) from the Memory Police, creating a tense atmosphere of paranoia and resistance. The sparse, dreamlike prose makes the horror all the more chilling.
What remains of us when our memories are gone? How do we preserve what matters when forces beyond our control decide what should be forgotten? It's a quiet, devastating allegory about the ways totalitarianism works by erasing history.
5. The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy
This novel revolves around twins Estha and Rahel, whose lives are destroyed by what Roy calls the "Love Laws" that determine "who should be loved, and how, and how much." Set in Kerala, India, in 1969, it moves between past and present to reveal how a forbidden relationship and a child's death shatter a family. Roy's prose is lush, inventive, and almost musical, capturing the perspective of children who don't yet understand the caste system, religious divisions, and gender expectations constraining their world. The "small things" of the title are both the intimate moments that shape our lives and the marginalized people society overlooks.
How do social structures crush individual desires? Can love transcend boundaries of caste, class, and family? The novel's nonlinear structure mirrors how trauma disrupts time, showing how a single day's events can reverberate across decades.
6. The Ministry of Utmost Happiness by Arundhati Roy
This sprawling novel begins with Anjum, a hijra (a transgender woman) who makes her home in a graveyard, creating a sanctuary for society's outcasts. Their lives intersect with Tilo, an architectural student turned activist caught in Kashmir's independence movement. Roy weaves together seemingly disparate narratives to create a tapestry of contemporary India: Hindu nationalism, Kashmir's occupation, environmental degradation, and the struggles of those who don't fit neatly into society's boxes. The novel asks how we create community amid violence and division.
What does it mean to build a home in the ruins? Roy's unflinching political vision is matched by her tender attention to human connection. How do we maintain hope in seemingly hopeless circumstances? Through fragments and broken things, Roy suggests that beauty and resistance persist even in devastation.
7. Know My Name by Chanel Miller
This memoir by the woman once known only as "Emily Doe" reclaims power and identity after becoming the victim in the infamous Stanford sexual assault case. Miller's lyrical, precise prose transforms her dehumanizing experience in the criminal justice system into something searingly human. What happens when a victim refuses to remain nameless? Moving between her Chinese American family history, her artistic aspirations, and the night that changed everything, Miller creates a document that transcends the boundaries of trauma narrative.
How does our legal system fail survivors while protecting perpetrators? The book challenges our cultural assumptions about victimhood, showing how Miller rebuilt herself not despite but through the act of witnessing her own story.
What does justice actually look like for survivors?
Miller's voice, by turns analytical, poetic, and righteously angry, demonstrates how writing itself can become an act of reclamation, forcing us to confront uncomfortable truths about power, privilege, and who we choose to believe.
8. Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri
This Pulitzer Prize-winning collection explores the lives of Indian and Indian American characters navigating cultural displacement, marital tensions, and the search for connection. In the title story, a tour guide in India develops an attraction to an Indian-American woman whose marriage is quietly unraveling. Lahiri's precision captures the subtle ways characters misunderstand each other across cultural and emotional divides. Lahiri's restrained prose belies the emotional intensity of her stories, which often pivot on seemingly small moments that reveal profound truths. How do we interpret our own struggles when we lack the language for them?
The collection examines loneliness within marriages, families, and communities, suggesting that being truly understood might be our deepest human longing.
9. The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri
This novel follows Gogol Ganguli from birth to adulthood as he struggles with his unusual name and his identity as the son of Bengali immigrants in America. Named after the Russian author his father was reading when he nearly died in a train accident, Gogol's name becomes the focal point for his ambivalence about his heritage. Lahiri chronicles the Ganguli family's gradual Americanization alongside Gogol's attempts to define himself apart from his parents' expectations. How much of our identity is inherited versus chosen?
The novel moves through pivotal moments in Gogol's life; college, relationships with women from different backgrounds, his father's death; as he gradually comes to appreciate the sacrifices his parents made.
10. The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan
This landmark novel interweaves the stories of four Chinese immigrant women and their American-born daughters, exploring the complexity of mother-daughter relationships across cultural and generational divides. Structured around Mah Jong gatherings where the mothers share their hopes and histories, the novel moves between past traumas in China and present misunderstandings in America. Tan shows how the mothers' experiences (war, abandonment, loss) shape their parenting in ways their daughters struggle to comprehend.
What stories do we inherit without knowing it? How do unspoken histories haunt families? Each narrative reveals how cultural translation fails even with the best intentions.
11. Pachinko by Min Jin Lee
This epic saga follows four generations of a Korean family who move to Japan following Japan's annexation of Korea. Beginning in 1910 with Sunja, a young pregnant woman who refuses to be a wealthy man's mistress, the novel traces how her choice shapes her descendants' lives as ethnic Koreans in Japan. Lee meticulously documents the discrimination they face despite being born in Japan, denied citizenship and forced into marginalized professions like pachinko parlor management. How do we maintain dignity when systems are designed to humiliate us? The novel shows characters making impossible choices between assimilation and cultural preservation, financial security and moral compromise. What constitutes home when you're permanently marked as foreign? Lee's sweeping narrative illuminates a history rarely told in English, showing how colonialism and nationalism continue to shape lives across generations.
12. Free Food for Millionaires by Min Jin Lee
This novel follows Casey Han, a Princeton-educated daughter of Korean immigrants who works in finance while harboring dreams of hat-making. Caught between her parents' traditionalism and Manhattan's wealth, Casey navigates class, race, and gender expectations while making spectacular financial and romantic mistakes. Lee creates a panoramic portrait of Korean American life in New York, exploring the communities, churches, and workplaces where identities are negotiated.
What does success mean when your definitions clash with your parents' sacrifices?
The novel examines how money shapes relationships, from Casey's credit card debt to her father's pride as a dry cleaner.
How do we reconcile ambition with connection? Lee's attention to social detail creates a Jane Austen-like exploration of manners and morals in a specific community, showing how personal choices are constrained by larger social forces.
13. Please Look After Mom by Kyung-sook Shin
When an elderly woman goes missing in Seoul's subway station, her family must confront how little they truly knew her. Told from multiple perspectives: her daughter, son, husband, and finally the missing woman herself, the novel reveals Mom not just as a self-sacrificing matriarch but as a complex woman with her own unfulfilled desires. Each family member's search becomes an examination of their own failings and the gendered expectations that made Mom invisible even to those closest to her. Shin's second-person narration in some sections implicates the reader in this negligence.
How much attention do we pay to those who care for us? What debts can never be repaid?
The novel explores traditional Korean concepts of filial piety while questioning whether modern life makes such devotion impossible.
What happens when societies transition faster than family structures can adapt?
14. Trick Mirror by Jia Tolentino
This collection of nine essays examines the cultural forces shaping millennial experience through Tolentino's incisive analysis of everything from reality television and athleisure to wedding culture and literary heroines. Tolentino, a Filipino-Canadian critic, brings a unique lens to internet culture, feminism, and late capitalism. The essays blend personal narrative with cultural criticism, moving from Tolentino's stint on a teen reality show to her analysis of campus rape culture to her experiences with ecstasy and religion.
Her writing is both intellectually rigorous and darkly funny as she examines how contemporary life traps us in systems of optimization and consumption while making us complicit in our own exploitation. How do we live ethically in fundamentally unethical structures? Rather than offering solutions, the essays illuminate contradictions: between feminist empowerment and capitalist cooptation, between self-improvement and self-acceptance, between the internet's promise of connection and its delivery of isolation, creating a portrait of a generation forced to navigate a hall of mirrors where every surface reflects back a distorted version of ourselves.
15. Chemistry by Weike Wang
This unnamed narrator is a PhD chemistry student on the verge of a breakdown, unable to complete her research or accept her boyfriend's marriage proposal. The novel's fragmented structure mirrors her analytical mind as she tries to apply scientific principles to human relationships and emotions. Wang's spare prose and deadpan humor capture the narrator's struggle as a Chinese American woman pressured by her immigrant parents' expectations and her own perfectionism.
The protagonist's scientific digressions become a lens for examining cultural differences, family dynamics, and the limitations of rationality. Through her crisis, the narrator gradually discovers that uncertainty might be necessary for growth.
16. Convenience Store Woman by Sayaka Murata
This novel follows Keiko Furukura, a 36-year-old woman who has worked at the same convenience store for 18 years, finding comfort in its clear rules and routines. Society views her as abnormal for her lack of career ambition, romantic relationships, or desire for children. Keiko's literal interpretation of social norms and her conscious mimicry of "normal" behavior creates both comedy and poignancy. Murata's matter-of-fact prose mirrors Keiko's perspective, making readers question which is truly stranger, Keiko's contentment or society's narrow definition of acceptable lives. What constitutes a meaningful existence?
When Keiko enters a sham relationship with a misogynistic man to appear normal, the novel becomes a sharp critique of gender expectations in contemporary Japan.
Why do we pathologize those who don't want what they're supposed to want?
Murata's deadpan satire exposes the absurdity of social conformity.
17. Breasts and Eggs by Mieko Kawakami
This novel begins with Natsuko welcoming her sister Makiko and niece Midoriko to Tokyo, where Makiko hopes to get breast enhancement surgery. The second half jumps forward ten years as Natsuko, now a published writer, contemplates having a child through sperm donation. Kawakami's unflinching examination of women's bodies (aging, modification, reproduction) creates a profound meditation on female autonomy in contemporary Japan.
The novel asks who owns women's bodies: themselves, men, society, or biology?
Natsuko's question about whether to have a child without a partner exposes societal assumptions about family structure and women's purpose. What constitutes kinship beyond blood? Kawakami's working-class characters struggle economically while grappling with philosophical questions about existence and purpose.
Why bring children into a precarious world? The novel's raw intimacy and humor create a revolutionary portrait of women's inner lives, desires, and contradictions.
18. Hijab Butch Blues by Lamya H
This memoir explores the author's journey as a queer Muslim navigating the seemingly contradictory aspects of her identity. Lamya's experiences, from growing up in a conservative Middle Eastern country to coming out in America, are interwoven with reinterpretations of texts that offer her unexpected solace and validation.
What happens when we reclaim religious narratives rather than abandoning them? How do we honor all parts of ourselves when the world demands we choose?
19. If I Had Your Face by Frances Cha
This novel follows four young women in Seoul navigating a society obsessed with appearance, status, and rigid hierarchy. Kyuri works at a "room salon" where men pay to drink with beautiful women. Ara is a mute hairstylist obsessed with a K-pop star. Miho is an artist who returned from New York with a wealthy boyfriend. Sujin saves for plastic surgery believing beauty is her only path to mobility. Cha creates a devastating portrait of contemporary Korea's impossible standards for women, where physical appearance determines opportunity and plastic surgery is practically mandatory for social advancement.
How do women support each other in a system designed to make them compete? The novel explores the brutal economics of beauty and the ways class determines which choices are available.
What does freedom look like in a society where women's value is primarily aesthetic?
Cha's unflinching realism captures both the damage of this system and the resilience of female friendship.
20. Bliss Montage by Ling Ma
This collection of short stories blends the surreal with the mundane in ways that get under your skin. In one story, a woman lives with all her ex-boyfriends in a house. In another, a drug called G makes you invisible. What's remarkable is how Ma uses these fantastical premises to explore deeply human experiences… immigration, relationships, motherhood, alienation.
The title itself suggests these stories are about moments of intense happiness that feel almost hallucinatory, but they're also about disillusionment and the gap between expectation and reality. Ma's prose is cool and detached even as she describes the most bizarre scenarios, creating this unsettling effect that stays with you.
What would you do if you could be invisible? How much of yourself would you give up to belong somewhere?
The collection asks how we construct realities to cope with trauma, loneliness, and dislocation. Each story creates its own dream logic that somehow illuminates truths about the immigrant experience, female friendship, and the ways we navigate power structures.
What fantasies do we need to survive our reality? Ma refuses easy resolutions or moral clarity, instead leaving readers in productive discomfort with her haunting, surreal visions.
21. Erotic Stories for Punjabi Widows by Balli Kaur Jaswal
This novel follows Nikki, a modern British-Sikh woman who takes a job teaching what she thinks will be a creative writing class for Punjabi widows at a community center in Southall. When the widows discover a book of erotic stories, they begin sharing their own tales of desire, revealing their hidden longings and challenging community taboos. Jaswal balances this joyful sexual awakening with a darker subplot about community surveillance and honor killings.
The widows' stories become acts of resistance against cultural silencing of female desire, particularly for older women presumed to be asexual after their husbands' deaths.
What freedoms can be found within tradition rather than abandoning it entirely? Jaswal's warm humor and genuine affection for her characters creates a celebration of female sexuality and solidarity across generational divides.
Who gets to tell stories about desire, and who must listen in silence?
22. Minor Feelings by Cathy Park Hong
This collection of essays blends memoir, cultural criticism, and history to examine what Hong calls "minor feelings:" the dissonance experienced when American optimism contradicts your lived reality as a racialized person. Hong, a Korean American poet, explores how Asian Americans occupy an unsettled position in America’s racial hierarchy, neither white nor Black, often used as a wedge in racial politics.
With unflinching honesty about her own contradictions and privileges, Hong creates a new language for discussing Asian American consciousness beyond the limiting narratives of immigrant striving or assimilation. This book feels like the conversation you've been waiting to have with your smartest, most perceptive friend who finally puts words to feelings you couldn’t articulate.
23. Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng
This novel begins with the Richardson family's house burning down, then rewinds to show how the arrival of nomadic artist Mia Warren and her daughter Pearl upends the planned community of Shaker Heights. Ng explores motherhood through multiple lenses: Elena Richardson’s rule-following perfection, Mia’s unconventional choices, and a custody battle between a Chinese immigrant who abandoned her baby and the wealthy white family trying to adopt her. The novel asks what makes someone a good mother, biological connection, stability, or something less definable?
Ng subtly examines how race, class, and privilege shape characters' options and perspectives. The Richardson children's fascination with Mia and Pearl reveals the limitations of suburban conformity.
What happens when we question the rules we've built our lives around? Ng's empathy extends to all her characters while exposing the systems that divide them.
24. The Last Story of Mina Lee by Nancy Jooyoun Kim
This novel alternates between Margot Lee discovering her mother Mina's body in her Koreatown apartment in 2014 and Mina's story as a new immigrant in 1987. As Margot investigates her mother’s death, she uncovers Mina's past as an undocumented worker, her love affair with another Korean immigrant, and the dangers faced by those without legal protection. Kim creates a portrait of Los Angeles’ Koreatown rarely seen in literature, showing the community’s businesses, churches, and networks that support newcomers.
What does it mean to truly know your parent as a person with their own history? The novel explores how language barriers and cultural differences create unbridgeable gaps between mothers and daughters. How do we grieve someone we never fully understood? Kim’s depiction of undocumented life reveals the precarity and exploitation faced by those building America from the shadows, raising questions about who belongs and who remains perpetually foreign in American society.
25. I Am Malala by Malala Yousafzai
This memoir chronicles Yousafzai's journey from a girl in Pakistan’s Swat Valley who advocated for girls’ education to becoming the youngest Nobel Peace Prize laureate after surviving a Taliban assassination attempt. Malala's voice shifts seamlessly between the everyday concerns of a schoolgirl (friendships, exams, family dynamics) and profound insights about religious extremism, gender oppression, and educational inequality. Written when she was just sixteen, the memoir reveals both Malala’s exceptional bravery and the loving family that shaped her values, particularly her father who encouraged her to speak out despite the dangers. Malala’s unsentimental account of her near-death experience and difficult recovery in England becomes a window into larger questions about displacement, global inequality, and the power dynamics between East and West.
The book offers no easy answers but instead shows how one girl’s voice became amplified into a global movement through a complex intersection of courage, circumstance, and media attention.
26. Disorientation by Elaine Hsieh Chou
This satirical campus novel follows Taiwanese American PhD student Ingrid Yang, who is writing her dissertation on the fictional Chinese American poet Xiao-Wen Chou. When Ingrid discovers Xiao-Wen Chou might actually be a white man who adopted a Chinese persona, her academic world implodes. Chou's biting comedy targets Orientalism in academia, Asian fetishization, performative activism, and identity politics. As Ingrid investigates the poet’s true identity, she’s forced to confront her own internalized racism and complicated relationship to her heritage.
What does authenticity mean in a world of constructed identities? The novel skewers both white appropriation and Asian American responses to it, refusing simple narratives of victimhood or empowerment.
How do institutions use diversity initiatives to maintain the status quo? Chou's over-the-top plot twists and absurdist humor create a campus novel that’s both wildly entertaining and deeply engaged with questions of representation, authorship, and the commodification of identity.
27. The Farm by Joanne Ramos
This debut novel examines a luxury surrogacy facility called Golden Oaks, where women (mostly immigrants) are paid to carry babies for the ultra-wealthy. Filipino American Jane, desperate to support her infant daughter, becomes a “host” at the Farm, where her body is no longer her own. Ramos creates a disturbingly plausible near-future that explores the intersection of reproductive technology, immigration, and late capitalism.
How do we value women's bodies and labor in a market-driven society?
The novel follows multiple perspectives: Jane; her older cousin Ate; Reagan, a white surrogate seeking purpose; and Mae, the ambitious Filipino American coordinator running the facility. What does freedom mean when economic necessity determines your choices? Ramos avoids simplistic villains, instead showing how systems of exploitation operate through complicity and compromise.
28. Crying in H Mart by Michelle Zauner
This memoir explores grief, identity, and the intricate language of food as Zauner processes her Korean mother’s death from cancer. The H Mart supermarket becomes both sanctuary and wound: a place where Zauner can connect with her heritage through the foods her mother loved while also confronting her absence. What remains of our cultural identity when the person who transmitted it to us is gone? Zauner’s precise, unflinching prose captures the complicated dynamics of a mother-daughter relationship marked by high expectations, fierce love, and cultural disconnection. How do we mourn someone we were still trying to understand?
The memoir examines Zauner’s journey from a rebellious teen rejecting her Korean heritage to an adult desperately trying to preserve it through cooking her mother’s recipes and reconnecting with relatives. What does it mean to be Korean American when you don’t speak the language fluently and look different from full Koreans? Zauner’s honest exploration of cultural hybridity shows how food becomes a language when words fail, creating a powerful meditation on the physical nature of both grief and love.
29. Yellowface by R.F. Kuang
This razor-sharp satirical novel follows June, a struggling white writer who steals her recently deceased Asian American friend Athena’s unpublished manuscript about Chinese laborers in World War I. After changing some details and publishing it under a racially ambiguous pen name, June achieves the literary stardom she always craved, until people start asking uncomfortable questions. What happens when white creators appropriate non-white stories for profit and prestige? Kuang brilliantly dissects the publishing industry’s performative diversity initiatives, literary Twitter’s cancellation cycles, and the complex racial politics of who gets to tell which stories.
Who owns our stories, and who profits from them? The novel offers no easy answers but forces readers to confront uncomfortable truths about consumption, creation, and the stories we tell ourselves about our own ethical boundaries.
30. Unaccustomed Earth by Jhumpa Lahiri
This collection of stories explores the lives of Bengali American characters navigating the spaces between inherited traditions and adopted homeland, between parental expectations and personal desires. The title, taken from Nathaniel Hawthorne, references the idea that transplanting people to new soil might allow them to flourish in unexpected ways, yet Lahiri shows how this uprooting also creates profound dislocations. What does it mean to belong nowhere completely? The stories follow characters at different life stages, from children of immigrants forming their identities to aging parents facing mortality far from their birthplace, creating a mosaic of the diaspora experience across generations.
How do we honor our origins while becoming ourselves? Lahiri’s precise, restrained prose belies the emotional turbulence beneath the surface of her characters’ carefully constructed lives, often revealing how small moments can expose the fault lines in families and relationships.
There is power in seeing aspects of your experience rendered on the page by someone who understands it from the inside. Not because all Asian women share identical experiences (these diverse works demonstrate quite the opposite), but because they engage with questions of belonging, cultural hybridity, family obligation, and self-determination that resonate deeply with many of us navigating multiple cultural identities.
The brilliance of these books extends far beyond their "Asian-ness." They are universal in their humanity, particular in their cultural insights, and revolutionary in their literary achievements.
Happy AAPI Month.
All my love,
Maalvika
Wow, fantastic. Thank you.
What an amazing list!!! I was so happy to see The Memory Police, Crying in H Mart, YellowFace, Pachinkno (this story lives rent free in my mind to this day) and If I Had Your Face. I personally felt a bit let down by the endings of Severance and Breast and Eggs- but that could have just been me.