10 New Books to Read This AAPI Heritage Month

Bat Eater and Other Names for Cora Zeng

YA author Baker (The Scarlet Alchemist) puts a supernatural twist on the early days of Covid in her searing adult debut. Cora Zeng is an underemployed art history major-turned New York City crime scene cleaner, eking out a living scrubbing bodies off the walls. In early 2020, she’s disconcerted to notice an uptick in murdered Asian women. Cora, who is mixed-race, does not believe in either Asian ghost stories or Western religion and always does what her aunties tell her to do—otherwise they might place her back in the psychiatric unit. Then her half sister, Delilah, is murdered in a hate crime, and Cora thinks she sees Delilah’s ghost in their shared apartment. As the Hungry Ghost Festival approaches, she starts seeing more and more restless spirits. She confesses these visions to her fellow cleaners, Harvey and Yifei, who help her hatch a plan to hold a feast for the ghosts, even as people around them are picked off one by one. Baker successfully uses fear, both supernatural and human, to shine a spotlight on anti-Asian hate. Fans of creepy ghost stories and social horror will want to snap this up. Agent: Mary C. Moore, Kimberley Cameron & Assoc. (Apr.)

Call Me Emma: One Chinese Girl Finds Her Way in America

Makee’s wide-eyed and insightful semi-autobiographical debut centers on a teenage immigrant whose adolescence is as hard to navigate as her new home in New York City. Yixuan emigrates from China with her family at age 14. At her high school, she adopts the Anglified name Emma and struggles to adapt to the enormous differences between U.S. and Chinese teen culture. “American classmates are useless!” she thinks as her lab partners slack off and flirt. Gradually, she finds her place, developing a passion for art, a crush on a schoolmate, and a grasp of the complex racial issues at her multicultural school. At the same time, her home life grows strained as her parents and sister have more trouble acclimating. “America is for young people like you,” her father tells her. “Not me.” Makee’s artwork has the simplicity of a teenager’s notebook sketches but bursts with telling details: school cafeteria lunches (“free but not so tasty”), vegetables grown in Chinese American yards, Yixuan’s first Thanksgiving dinner. The result is both a painfully candid coming-of-age tale and a warts-and-all portrait of America. (May)

Down in the Sea of Angels

Wong (The Circus Infinite) delivers a powerful intergenerational sci-fi tale set after the collapse of modern society in 2052, and the Bloom in 2072, which allowed psionic abilities, a range of psychic powers, to emerge in parts of the general population. In 2106, Maida Sun is a psion with the ability to see the history of any object she touches. She’s on her first work assignment at a cultural recovery site in San Francisco, when she finds a jade teacup through which she experiences visions and memories of two of its past owners: Li Nuan, who was forced into sex work in 1906, and Nathan Zhao, a hard-partying tech bro in 2006. Both also had visions of the past and future when in contact with the teacup. Through their stories, Maida comes to realize the deep impact of past events, and the unique connection she develops with both Li Nuan and Nathan may allow her to influence her dystopian present. While not shying away from themes of climate collapse and oppression, Wong also uses his well-shaded characters to highlight the courage it takes to effect change even in one’s small corner of the world. This stirring novel is an inspiration during trying times. Agent: Amy Collins, Talcott Notch Literary. (Apr.)

The Emperor of Gladness

Poet Vuong follows up his acclaimed first novel, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, with a searching and beautiful story of a troubled young man. “The hardest thing in the world is to live only once,” 19-year-old Hai narrates in the opening line, but there’s a dark edge to the sentiment. The reader first meets Hai on a bridge in East Gladness, Conn., where he’s about to jump to his death. He’s stopped by Grazina, an 82-year-old Lithuanian woman. She invites him to stay with her, and as her dementia worsens, he cares for her—feeding her, bathing her, and administering medicine. The experience soothes Hai: “How strange to feel something so close to mercy... at the end of a road of ruined houses by a toxic river.” Hai tells his mother he is attending medical school, but in fact, shortly before meeting Grazina, he was released from rehab for opioid addiction. Now, while staying with the older woman, he takes a job at the restaurant where his cousin works, and pops Dilaudids “to hold him over” during shifts. Vuong’s scenes are vivid, and the pitch-perfect dialogue cuts like a knife (“Never cry in a diner,” Grazina tells Hai. “They charge extra if they catch you. Believe me. I’ve seen it happen”). This downbeat tale soars to astonishing heights. Agent: Frances Coady, Aragi Inc. (May)

Goddess Complex

Sathian (Gold Diggers) wraps a whip-smart satire of Millennial womanhood around an arresting story of mistaken identity. Narrator Sanjana Satyananda leaves her husband, actor Killian Bane, behind at a commune in India, driven away by his pressure to have children. She returns to New Haven, Ct., where she confirms she’s pregnant and has an abortion. Afterward, however, she begins receiving mysterious text messages from strangers in India congratulating her on her pregnancy. Meanwhile, she struggles to restart her life, as she’s unable to contact Killian to initiate divorce proceedings. She also withers under the scrutiny of her married older sister, Maneesha, who monitors her on a home security camera while she house-sits for the Hindu couple, and chafes at her friend Lia’s joy at being pregnant. At Lia’s baby shower, a guest shows her an Instagram account belonging to a pregnant woman named Sanjena Sathian, who looks just like her, and she realizes the mystery messages are likely meant for Sanjena. The novel then morphs into a dazzling Operation Shylock–esque hall of mirrors, as the narrator heads back to India for the dual purpose of tracking down Killian and confronting her double, a search that eventually leads her to a Hindu fertility resort. Sathian’s social commentary is riotous (guests at Lia’s shower wear masks with Lia’s face emblazoned with the term “MommyBoss”) and she finds intriguing new angles on the doppelgänger theme (“I never knew you could accidentally become the wrong version of you”). This is incandescent. Agent: Susan Golomb, Writers House. (Mar.)

I Leave it Up to You

A gay Korean American man wakes up from a coma and reckons with unresolved family issues in this perceptive story of arrested development from Chong (Flux). Jack Jr., the 30-year-old narrator, has no recollection of the car accident that put him in the hospital two years earlier, and his family is silent about the whereabouts of his fiancé, Ren. Told that he’s lost his copywriting job along with his Manhattan apartment, he reluctantly moves back in with his parents in Fort Lee, N.J., the hometown he fled at 18 after refusing to take over the family sushi restaurant. Now, with nothing else to do and heartbroken to learn Ren has married someone else, he starts pitching in at the restaurant. His parents remain reticent, however, preferring to act like he’d never left. Just as he begins to settle back into his old life, he starts a new romance. Torn once again between forging a new path and meeting his family’s expectations, he realizes he’s never really matured. Chong expertly captures the family’s complicated dynamics and ratchets up the tension as they finally break the silence about the past. It’s a satisfying drama. Agent: Danielle Bukowski, Sterling Lord Literistic. (Mar.)

Julie Chan Is Dead

Zhang debuts with a witty and insightful thriller about the pitfalls of influencer culture. Julie Chan and her twin sister, Chloe, were four years old when their parents died in a car accident. Chloe was adopted by the Van Huusens—an affluent couple in New York City—while Julie was sent to live with her grouchy, penny-pinching aunt. Now, at 24, Chloe and her luxurious lifestyle have attracted over a million social media followers, lucrative brand partnerships, and frequent all-expenses-paid trips to exotic locales. Julie, meanwhile, spends her days scanning coupons behind a cash register at SuperFoods. After years without contact, Chloe calls Julie and delivers a brief, garbled “I’m sorry” before she’s cut off. A worried Julie heads for New York, where she finds her sister dead. When the police mistake Julie for Chloe, the temptation proves overpowering, and she decides to step into her twin’s designer shoes. Suddenly, Julie is welcomed into the upper echelon of the country’s influencers—but she soon discovers that the newfound attention brings with it the kind of danger that may have cost Chloe her life. Zhang offsets the novel’s fast and entertaining first two acts with a gonzo final third, displaying impressive audacity for a newbie. It’s a marvel. Agent: Samantha Haywood, Transatlantic Agency. (Apr.)

Optional Practical Training

In Sunder’s astute and stimulating debut novel (after the collection Boomtown Girl), an Indian woman reckons with racial prejudice and draconian immigration laws in post-9/11 America. It’s 2006 when Pavitra graduates from college in the U.S., hoping to extend her stay as long as possible. She’s hired to teach math and physics at a Massachusetts private school where she hopes to receive a work visa and buy time to finish her novel, a pursuit considered “frivolous” by her parents and relatives back home in Bangalore. As Pavitra grapples with the weight of her family’s expectations, she realizes that her acquaintances in America also carry preconceived notions about her. For example, her white landlord assumes, for the sake of his own comfort, that she’s a member of the Brahmin caste. In conversations with her friends, Pavitra examines what it means to be perceived as a person of color (“The term ‘of color’ struck me as ridiculous. Only in America, it seemed to me, would people coin such labels as ‘person of color’ and ‘legal alien’ ”) and grapples with other unique aspects of American culture, such as the prizing of “an individual’s opinions.” In a striking climax, Pavitra confronts the limits of what she’s been promised by the school and of her ability to move freely between the U.S. and India, and the novel coheres into a crystalline portrait of a woman straddling cultures and expectations while attempting to discover who she is. It’s a knockout. Agent: Sarah Burnes, Gernert Co. (Mar.)

Something Cheeky

Lam (Full Exposure) impresses in this bighearted and inclusive take on the friends-to-lovers trope. In college, Zoe Tran and Derek Bui were inseparable. They dreamed of taking the theatrical world by storm and increasing AAPI representation as a costume designer and a director, respectively. Together, they conceived of a musical adaptation of a traditional Vietnamese fairy tale—but then their friendship fell apart. Six years later, Zoe is the successful owner of a plus-size lingerie boutique, Something Cheeky, and Derek is a rising director. When he’s offered the chance to debut the musical he initially dreamed of with Zoe, he refuses to do it without her. Despite lingering hurt on both sides, Zoe agrees to join his all-Asian production—but reentering the theater world brings back memories of the racist microaggressions and misogyny that made her walk away in the first place. Meanwhile, as they work together closely, demisexual Zoe’s long-standing feelings for Derek become impossible to deny. But when a white artistic director pressures Derek to make the production “more palatable” to white audiences, he and Zoe clash over how to respond, and their new love may fizzle before it can fully flame. Lam moves the plot along at a rapid clip while balancing fun behind-the-scenes drama; sparky, sex-positive romance; and nuanced social commentary. This is a treat. (Mar.)

The World of Nancy Kwan: A Memoir by Hollywood’s Asian Superstar

Actor Kwan chronicles her rise to stardom and her journey from Hong Kong to Hollywood in her inspiring debut. “My father was Chinese and my mother was English, and I always felt it gave me a better understanding of human nature,” Kwan writes, teeing up her account of her 1940s childhood “between two worlds” in Hong Kong’s Kowloon district. As a child, she aspired to become a ballerina. After a talent scout at an open casting call convinced her to do a screen test, however, a 20-year-old Kwan was offered a six-month contract, which soon led to the title role in the 1960 Hollywood film The World of Suzie Wong. As she charts her career, Kwan intertwines lighthearted anecdotes and heftier insights. For example, she reflects on the significance of being part of an all-Asian cast in her second film, Flower Drum Song, during a time when yellowface was a common casting practice, while offering an amusing behind-the-scenes recollection of Fred Astaire surprising the cast at a dance rehearsal. Elsewhere, she tackles racist stereotypes, the casting couch, and the loss of her son with aplomb. The result is an empowering personal history from an artistic trailblazer. Agent: Susan Canavan, Waxman Agency. (Apr.)