Twenty Books by Mixed Asian Authors for Fans of Every Genre

Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow spans 30 years and follows two friends — often in love, but never lovers — as they come together as creative partners in the world of video game design, where success brings them fame, joy, tragedy, duplicity, and even a kind of immortality.

A favorite of the MAM team!

Win Me Something follows half-Chinese and half-white Willa Chen who has struggled with belonging and loneliness her whole life. When she accepts a job as a nanny for a wealthy white family in New York, she finds herself lost in self examination, neither an outsider nor a participant in their glamorous world.

We Ride Upon Sticks is set in 1989 Danvers, Massachusetts (the site of the Salem Witch Trials) and follows the high school field hockey team as they discover that the dark impulses of their Salem forebears may be the key to a winning season.

How High We Go in the Dark follows a cast of intricately linked characters over hundreds of years as humanity struggles to rebuild itself in the aftermath of a climate plague.

A recommendation from the MAM team!

The Bone Shard Daughter is set in a world where bone magic powers the animal-like constructs that maintain law and order. When the emperor refuses to recognise his daughter as heir to the throne, she vows to prove her worth by mastering the forbidden art of bone shard magic.

You can read MAM’s interview with Andrea Stewart here!

The Kiss Quotient follows a 30-year-old econometrician on the autism spectrum who is successful but lacks experience in her dating life. Deciding that practice makes perfect, she hires an escort to teach her the ways of dating, only to find their no-nonsense partnership seems to make a lot of sense.

I Love You So Mochi follows a Japanese American teenager who, following a fallout with her mother, goes to visit her estranged grandparents in Kyoto for spring break and meets a cute aspiring med student who moonlights as a costumed mochi mascot.

You can read MAM’s interview with Sarah Kuhn here!

Monstress is a series set in an alternate matriarchal 1900's steampunk Asia and tells the story of a teenage girl who is struggling to survive the trauma of war and shares a mysterious psychic link with a powerful monster.

A recommendation from the MAM team!

Laura Dean Keeps Breaking Up With Me follows a teenage girl struggling to navigate friendship while seeking help from advice columns and psychics to deal with her girlfriend who won’t stop breaking up with her.

When We Were Infinite follows high school senior Beth, whose only wish is for her tight-knit group of friends to stay together. When she and her friends witness an act of violence in one of their friend’s houses, they’re shaken and make a pact to do whatever it takes to protect him. A heartbreaking look into mental health, the importance of friendship, mother-daughter relationships, and mixed Asian identity in an all-Asian friend group.

A favorite of the MAM team!

Turtle Under Ice is written in verse and follows Filipino/Chamorro sisters still reeling from their mother’s death six years ago. When one disappears, the other tries to piece together the mystery and realize she may have been part of the reason her sister left in the first place.

Darius the Great is Not Okay is a coming of age novel about half-Persian Darius who visits Iran for the first time and meets his ailing grandfather, loving grandmother, and the boy next door who changes everything. A book about identity, father-son relationships, mental health, masculinity and family.

A favorite of the MAM team!

Lalani of the Distant Sea is a fantasy novel inspired by Filipino folklore and is a story about bravery, friendship, self-reliance, and the choice between accepting fate or forging your own path.

You can read MAM’s interview with Erin Entrada Kelly here!

The Whole Story of Half a Girl is about Sonia, who’s thrown into public school — where her Indian/Jewish heritage makes her classmates ask a lot of questions — after her dad loses his job. When her dad goes missing, she begins to look for answers, and has to decide who her true friends are.

In Jennifer Chan Is Not Alone, Mallory worries next-door-neighbor and alien fanatic Jennifer Chan may have been abducted by aliens. She reunites with two former friends to try and find Jennifer by following clues from her diary — and prove that her bullying isn’t the reason Jennifer went missing.

You can read MAM’s interview with Tae Keller here!

Mixed Feelings: Poems and Stories is actor Avan Jogia’s collection of poetry, stories, and art about living as a mixed-race person in a world increasingly fixated on racial identity.

No Matter the Wreckage presents readers with work that showcases Sarah Kay's knack for celebrating family, love, travel, history, and unlikely love affairs between inanimate objects, among other curious topics. 

Know My Name is a memoir in which Chanel Miller reclaims her identity to tell her story of trauma, transcendence, and the power of words after being sexually assaulted by then Stanford University athlete Brock Turner.

Half and Half: Writers on Growing Up Biracial and Bicultural is a book of 18 essays, joined by a shared sense of duality, addressing both the difficulties of not fitting into and the benefits of being part of two worlds.

A recommendation from the MAM team!

Crying in H Mart is a memoir by Michelle Zauner (frontwoman of indie-pop band Japanese Breakfast) about her complicated relationships with her mother and her Korean heritage — before, during, and after her mother’s terminal cancer diagnosis.

You can read MAM’s interview with Michelle Zauner here!