May is Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month, and I want to say upfront what the original version of this post said: the AAPI label is genuinely strange. It groups together cultures, languages, histories, and identities spanning East Asia, South Asia, and the Pacific Islands — and, in some definitions, parts of the Middle East. That’s not a coherent category. It’s an administrative convenience that sometimes tips into erasure.
But as Harmeet Kaur observed at CNN, it persists because there’s no better single term, and the absence of a better term isn’t a reason to ignore the writers. So I use the label the way it’s intended — as an imperfect placeholder that points to a vast and varied literary tradition that deserves attention well past the calendar month it’s been assigned to.
The four books below are what I was reading and recommending this past year. They have almost nothing in common except that the authors are Asian American or Pacific Islander and all four books are, in different ways, extraordinary.
Audition — Katie Kitamura
Literary Fiction · Riverhead Books, 2025
Get it on Amazon
An accomplished actress meets a young man for lunch in a Manhattan restaurant. He claims to be her son. She knows this is impossible — she has never given birth. And yet…
That setup sells Audition short. What Kitamura is actually doing is something considerably more disorienting: building a novel that questions whether identity itself is stable, whether the roles we play — partner, parent, artist, stranger — are performances we choose or fictions we’re trapped inside. The book is structured to generate maximum uncertainty about what’s real and who the narrator actually is.
The prose is the reason the book has the reputation it has. Kitamura writes with an austerity that makes every sentence carry weight beyond its apparent content. The Observer called it like “reading a knife out of the freezer.” Audition was shortlisted for the 2025 Booker Prize, named a Barack Obama favorite book of the year, and landed on nearly every major best-of list. If you’ve been putting it off because the premise sounds slight, trust that Kitamura is doing much more than the premise suggests.
For educators specifically: there’s a conversation to be had about this book and the performance demands of teaching — the way we occupy professional roles that are partly constructed, partly real, and always subject to revision by the people watching us. The Science of Learning and Development tells us that relationships are the substrate of learning; Audition asks what a relationship even is when you can’t be certain who the other person is.
Hammajang Luck — Makana Yamamoto
Science Fiction / Heist · Harper Voyager, 2024
Get it on Amazon
Hammajang is Hawaiian Pidgin for “all messed up” — and that’s both the state of Edie’s life when the novel opens and a fairly accurate description of the plan they’re about to agree to. Edie just got out of prison after eight years. Their sister is pregnant and their niece is sick. They need money and can’t get hired anywhere because they once tried to rob a trillionaire tech god. And now that tech god’s ex-partner is back, with one more job, and Edie is — inevitably — going to say yes.
Hammajang Luck is a queer, AAPI cyberpunk heist novel set on a space station, and Yamamoto was born on Maui and uses Hawaiian Pidgin as a living language of the future rather than an archaeological curiosity. That choice alone is worth your attention — the genre history of science fiction is full of futures where cultural diversity has been flattened into homogeneity, and Yamamoto’s novel pushes back against that directly.
It’s also just enormously fun. The Ocean’s Eight comparisons are everywhere in the reviews and they’re accurate: a lovable crew with complementary skills, a target who deserves what’s coming, and an enemies-to-lovers subplot threading through the heist logistics. Publisher’s Weekly called it “a blast.” Read it when you need something that fully delivers on its premise.
Searches: Selfhood in the Digital Age — Vauhini Vara
Nonfiction / Essay Collection · Grove Atlantic, 2025
Get it on Amazon
If you’ve been thinking about AI and identity — and at this point, who hasn’t — Vara’s essay collection is the most honest and most personal thing I’ve encountered on that terrain. You may know her from the viral 2021 essay in which she used GPT to write about her sister’s death, collaborating with a language model on her grief because she couldn’t write it alone. Searches extends that project outward: into how the internet reshapes how we construct and present ourselves, what we lose and what we gain in digital mediation, and what it means to be a person in a world that increasingly reflects your searches back at you.
Vara writes from the inside of these questions — as a journalist who has covered the tech industry, as someone who has used AI for genuinely personal work, as a person whose identity has been filtered through systems she didn’t design. This is neither utopian enthusiasm nor panic. It’s harder than both.
The Connectivist in me finds Vara’s work fascinating for the way she grapples with knowledge distributed across networks — the way digital tools aren’t just things we use but environments that shape us, systems that alter the connections through which we come to know ourselves. Siemens would recognize the landscape she’s describing. So would any student who has tried to figure out who they are in the era of algorithmic recommendation.
The Manor of Dreams — Christina Li
Gothic Fiction / Family Drama · Atria Books, 2025
Get it on Amazon
Chinese American actress Vivian Yin dies and leaves a will that surprises everyone — including her daughters, who expected to inherit her estate and instead find themselves entangled in a mystery centered on a possibly haunted manor and family secrets thick enough to be load-bearing.
Li has a gift for atmosphere and generational tension, and The Manor of Dreams earns its gothic credentials honestly: the house has genuine menace, the family has genuine wounds, and the mystery slowly reveals itself in ways that feel earned rather than mechanical. This is the book for readers who want something immersive and emotionally layered and willing to sit in unease.
It also does something that the best family stories do — it treats the silences and evasions between generations as a form of communication in themselves, as meaningful as anything said directly. The things Vivian’s daughters don’t know about their mother aren’t gaps to be filled; they’re the story.
Why This List Exists
The point of “AAPI Heritage Month” — like Black History Month, like Hispanic Heritage Month — was never to contain the literature and the histories to a single calendar slot. The books above were published across 2024 and 2025, written by authors from Maui, from Chinese American families, from Japanese American journalism, from communities that have been making literature in and about the United States for generations. They don’t fit into a single tradition or aesthetic. They don’t represent “the AAPI experience” — there is no such single experience.
What they represent is what all good literature represents: people thinking carefully about the world they inhabit, in forms specific enough to be true and resonant enough to travel. Read them because they’re excellent. The month is incidental.
Related on this site: Why aren’t people reading books anymore? explores the structural forces that narrow what gets read — which connects directly to why reading outside the default matters.
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