This month we proudly celebrate Asian American and Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander Heritage Month and the important role of Asian and Asian American voices in our culture and in our classrooms all year long. We’re spotlighting the achievements and contributions of those in the community who have greatly and positively impacted American culture at large. We recognize and celebrate books by Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander creators that educate, empower, and inspire students all year-round.
Here is a stunning graphic memoir recounting George Takei’s childhood imprisoned within American concentration camps during World War II. Experience the forces that shaped an American icon—and America itself—in this gripping tale.
Here is a dual first-person memoir by the acclaimed Vietnamese-American novelist, Lan Cao, and her thoroughly American teenage daughter, Harlan Margaret Van Cao.
Gish Jen’s collection takes measure of the fifty years since the opening of China through eleven linked stories that trace the intimate ways in which humans make and are made by history.
Winner of the Newbery Medal
Winner of the Asian/Pacific American Award for Children’s Literature
This uplifting story brings Korean folklore to life as a girl goes on a quest to unlock the power of stories and save her grandmother.
Angel & Hannah is an unforgettable story of an interracial couple in 1990s New York City, a Korean American girl from Queens, New York, and Angel, a Puerto Rican boy from Brooklyn, who are determined to protect their love against all odds.
To Paradise is a bold, brilliant novel spanning three centuries and three different versions of the American experiment, about lovers, family, loss and the elusive promise of utopia.
On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous
Winner of the New England Book Award for Fiction
On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous is a letter from a son to a mother who cannot read. The letter unearths a family’s history—a history whose epicenter is rooted in Vietnam—and serves as a doorway into parts of his life his mother has never known.
This powerful debut memoir about labor and self-worth that traces a Chinese immigrant’s journey to an American future. Traveling from Wenzhou to Xi’an to New York, Made in China is unafraid to ask thorny questions about trauma and survival in immigrant families.
The Magic Fish (A Graphic Novel)
Winner of the International Literacy Association Award
In this graphic novel, fairy tales are the only way one boy can communicate with his Vietnamese immigrant parents. Here is a powerful read about family, identity, and the enduring magic of stories.
Winner of the Pen/Robert W. Bingham Prize
Through an indelible array of lives, Yoon Choi explores where first and second generations either clash or find common ground, where meaning falls in the cracks between languages, where relationships bend under the weight of tenderness and disappointment.
How Much of These Hills Is Gold
C Pam Zhang gives an electric debut novel set against the twilight of the American gold rush, in which two siblings are on the run in an unforgiving landscape—trying not just to survive but to find a home.
Nicole Chung was born severely premature, placed for adoption by her Korean parents, and raised by a white family in a sheltered Oregon town. With warmth, candor, and startling insight, Nicole Chung tells of her search for the people who gave her up, which coincided with the birth of her own child.
Searing and unforgettable, Beautiful Country is an essential American story about a family fracturing under the weight of invisibility,and an undocumented child living in poverty in the richest country in the world—a girl coming of age in the shadows, who never stops seeking the light.
Last Night at the Telegraph Club
America in 1954 is not a safe place for two girls to fall in love, especially not in Chinatown. Red-Scare paranoia threatens everyone, including Chinese Americans like Lily Hu. With deportation looming over her father, Lily risks everything to let her love for another girl, Kathleen Miller, see the light of day.
Here is Michelle Zauner’s unflinching, powerful memoir about growing up Korean American, losing her mother, and forging her own identity. Vivacious and plainspoken, lyrical and honest, Crying in H Mart is an exquisite story of family, food, grief, and endurance.
Here is an original debut novel about a group of friends and their immigrant families from Queens, New York—a tenderly observed, fiercely poetic love letter to a modern generation of brown girls.
A family feud before the start of seventh grade propels Meilan Hua from Boston’s Chinatown to rural Ohio, where she must tap into her inner strength and sense of justice to make a new place for herself in this resonant debut.
Here is Elizbeth Miki Brina’s memoir about her journey to understanding her complicated parents—her mother an Okinawan war bride, her father a Vietnam veteran—and her own, fraught cultural heritage.
Vietnamerica
Vietnamerica is a visually stunning portrait of survival, escape, and reinvention—and of the gift of the American immigrants’ dream, passed on to their children. In telling his family’s story, GB Tran finds his own place in this saga of hardship and heroism.
More AANHPI High School titles
More AANHPI Middle School titles
Penguin Random House is proud to support non-profit organizations focused on key issues in the community, such as mental health access and stopping anti-Asian racism and violence. Two of the organizations we are partnering with this year are the Asian Mental Health Collective, and NYC-based Soar Over Hate.
