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Reads for Asian Heritage Month
May is Asian Heritage Month, and the perfect chance to check out new and new-to-you books by Asian-Canadian writers.
All Books in this Collection
Showing 81–96 of 128 results
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Slice the Water
$26.00Longlisted, Canada Reads
Born on the lush island nation of Mahana, Fred lives under the tyrannical rule of a book-burning king. Under the king’s rule, Mahanians are controlled by a military dictatorship and threatened with forced starvation, while people with disabilities are exiled. After Fred’s father suddenly disappears, Fred joins an underground movement of dissenters and becomes an unwitting global icon in the fight for Mahanian freedom. When he is recruited and relocated by an organization that appears sympathetic to Fred’s cause, he arrives in a seemingly peaceful foreign nation, where the impact of social media and technology creates a new, stranger struggle.
A dystopian thriller, a work of speculative fiction, and a coming-of-age story, Wong’s novel thrums with biting bursts of staccato-like prose — a fitting accompaniment to a fascinating exploration of contrasting political systems. As Fred unpeels layers of truth and sees beyond the optics of altruism and the illusion of choice, Slice the Water unpacks the myriad amplifying impacts of technology, addiction, and complacency.
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Small Beauty
$18.95Coping with the death of her cousin, Mei abandons her life in the city to live in his now empty house in a small town. There she connects with his history as well as her own, learns about her aunt’s long-term secret relationship, and reflects on the trans women she has left behind.
Small Beauty explores the protagonist’s transness, but it also tenderly yet bitterly unpacks her experiences as a mixed-race person of Chinese descent, cycles of death and loss, and queer and intergenerational community. Small Beauty wanders through isolation, and then breaks it.
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Spinster Kang
$22.95Thirty-two-year-old Kang is a new immigrant in Toronto. Having an older sister who was raped and suffers from the ensuing stigma in China, Kang is determined to remain a spinster, which has its own stigma in China, and she struggles with her fear and distrust of men. But Kang’s story is not a hard luck story. She is an intelligent woman and a successful immigrant. Kang deals with the perplexities of a different culture by maintaining a sense of curiosity, an enjoyment of learning about the new culture, and by finding humour rather than the humiliation that so often characterizes descriptions of immigrant experience. Kang rooms with Tania, a Russian immigrant, and learns that many years earlier, Tanya was in love with a Chinese medical student at Moscow University who was abruptly returned to China for having had a relationship with her. Kang’s own father once studied at that university but has never talked about it since he was forced to leave Moscow and then was labelled as a rightist during the Chinese Anti-Rightist Campaign. Since then her father has been dispatched to work and live in Kunming, a city far away from Beijing. Could the paths of her father and Tania have ever crossed? Curious about her father’s past, Kang decides to pay a visit to Moscow, accompanied by Brian, Tania’s nephew, a charming engineer who wants to explore his Russian Jewish roots. Spending time with Brian helps Kang to see how much her sister’s tragedy has shadowed her life. When Brian suddenly shows symptoms of schizophrenia, Kang must decide whether to throw her spinster’s hat away or end her relationship with Brian.
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Spiritual Pursuits and Other Stories
$22.95Lien Chao’s new collection of stories is about Toronto as a meeting place for people of all backgrounds. Set in the decades from the 1980s to the 2020s, the stories depict the ripple effects of China’s economic success, the peak of business globalization, and its inevitable decline during the COVID-19 pandemic. The author has chosen an unhampered social and geographical setting to observe Canadians in the world and at home, including immigrants and refugees. The author has depicted in great detail friendships among neighbours and single women. As Canadians merge into mixed neighbourhoods, spiritual pursuits in individual lifestyles are shared socially as communal rituals.
These five long stories touch on a number of social groups. Newcomer portrait artists build their businesses on the streets of downtown Toronto in the 1990s; a Canadian business club tries hard to enter the retail markets in China in the 2010s; a multi-millionaire from China organizes an artists’ salon in Scarborough; a group of spiritual pursuers meet weekly in Markham Village for meditation and discussion of ancient Chinese wisdom and spirituality.
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Straight Outta Busan
$19.99A collection of short cartoons from Stefano Jun chronicling his experiences growing up a Korean immigrant in Western Canada. Having moved to Canada as an 8 year old with no knowledge of English, Stefano encounters culture shock, family love, friendship, and ultimately finding a place for himself in the vast country he has called home for 20 years now.
These slice of life stories are a keenly observed insight into the experience of growing up in an unfamiliar place. Full of emotion, humour and surprise, Modern Asian Family: Straight Outta Busan is a delight to read.
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SUBTEXT
SUBTEXT refracts the language of identity formation. It collages the echoes of diasporic and colonial histories through poetry, drama, autobiography, and archival uncovering. Divided into four parts, SUBTEXT peers into the imperceptible psychic strata created by intergenerational trauma, confronting the challenge of finding one’s place in a sensorium of concealed realities and obscured memories. Dwelling in the bubbling froth of dreamwork, these poems take a multifaceted approach to questions of diaspora and selfhood, incorporating visual and textual elements that dialogue with one another and ask readers to negotiate the unsteady shoals of identity and history.
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Sultans of the Street
$15.95When young orphans Mala and Chun Chun encounter brothers Prakash and Ojha on the busy streets of Kolkata, they are immediately at odds. The brothers come from a lower-middle-class family and spend their time flying kites instead of attending class, while Mala and Chun Chun can only dream of going to school, a goal Aunty promises will be fulfilled if they beg for money from passersby. After a petty fruit-stall heist lands Ojha in Aunty’s cunning hands, the brothers are blackmailed into begging alongside Mala and Chun Chun, forcing the children to interact. Though they find each other nuisances at first, the kids soon realize their strength in numbers as Aunty’s scheming is slowly revealed.
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Tabako on the Windowsill
$23.95An altar is a door; wonder is the key.
What losses and intimacies bring you to this threshold? Tabako on the Windowsill contends tenderly with such questions, initiating through them the work of transformation.
To shape an entire book around portals and thresholds is to search for living myth. Hari Alluri’s poems build from comic books, television, paintings, folklore, music, and a unique imagination. Following an immigrant point of view while maintaining home in a language that engages with blood and chosen family, Alluri offers multiple lived and ancestral spaces in India, the Philippines, Nigeria, the U.S., and Canada. Guided by a burning attention – to braids of displacement, loss, and joy, to multiple beginnings – Alluri creates moments where we can expand through the personhood of perception into wider, overlapping worlds of perspective and possibility.
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Tales from the Bottom of My Sole
$20.00#1 Best Canadian Gay Fiction on Goodreads
When a long-lost sister shows up as a trans man named Luke, a series of precipitous events throws the lives of boyfriends Daniel and David into turmoil. While David attends an extravagant family reunion in Sicily, Daniel’s ex Marcus plans the world-premiere of his one-man show. The couple’s vertiginous exploration of sex, intimacy and love comes to a head when a shocking revelation tests their commitment and future together.
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Tales of the Emperor
$19.95Tales of the Emperor is based on the life of Qin Shi Huang (circa 260–210 BCE), the “First Emperor” – he who unified China, gave it his name, built the Great Wall, entombed an army of terra cotta soldiers, authored legalism, erased history, insinuated governance, and established paranoia as a national characteristic. His dynasty did not outlive him but his influence permeates the present and, there is ample indication, will dominate the future.
The literary method of Tales of the Emperor is derived from the first Chinese attempt at “writing history” – the famous Historical Records of Ssu-Ma Ch’ien. Like that Chinese classic, Tales of the Emperor is motivated by the desire to understand the past by entering it, mixing testimony with anecdote, interpretation with invention, biography with characterization, objective analysis with passionate self-interest.
Birth to death, Tales of the Emperor tells the story of its central figure in a thematic rather than a chronologic narrative. In a mosaic of separate tales – some no more than fragments, others chapter-length – intersecting characters are presented, entwined, relinquished, among them a failed assassin, a wily adviser, an ironic architect, a castrated historian, an entire tribe of grave builders, and, of course, the wry, conflicted, everyday tyrant himself. The Emperor’s accomplishments are documented, his strivings are examined, and intimate tittle-tattle about him is indulged.
There’s only one principal theme: you find the antiquity you look for, or, in the language of the book: “history is the study of the paintings of great events.”
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Tales of the Mountains and the Sea
$22.95Genre-bending and tinged with myth and folklore, these haunting debut stories centre young women at significant points in Lebanese history.
A teenage girl mourns the death of her grandmother, only to feel her grandmother’s spirit possessing her in a way that seems malicious. A family, struggling to make ends meet, receives an unexpected visitor, who has an awful proposal that may be impossible to refuse. A young girl worries that her brother is falling in with the wrong crowd, as civil war breaks out on the streets around them.
The five stories in Tales of the Mountains and the Sea trace pivotal movements in modern Lebanese history and the effects they have on women. As she centres women and the choices that they make, Dania Idriss deftly weaves together history and folktales in a way that is both evocative and chilling. The Tales of the Mountains and the Sea is a startling and astonishing debut that navigates the intricate nuances of human experience, cultural identity, family history, and the lasting impacts of war.
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Tamil Terrains
$23.00What happens when a two-thousand-year-old language rooted in a classical poetics of land moves, along with some of its peoples, through colonial and postcolonial upheaval, war, and forced or voluntary migrations?
Questioning traditional concepts of time, place, labour, love, purity, and gender, this prismatic collection of poems, translations, transcreations draws connections between ancient Sangam landscapes and migrant labour songs; classical Tamil love poems and the wounded memories of colonial plantation workers and undocumented refugees.
Building community with each other, Tamil translators living on Indigenous terrains in North America reflect on the violence of settler colonialism, descendants of Tamil indentured labourers in Malaysia and Singapore confront erasures inflicted upon them, and those rooted in Tamil’s traditional homelands encounter the intimacies and distances of a migrant tongue.
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Taobao
$20.00In twelve spare, fable-like short stories Dan K. Woo introduces us to a fascinating cast of characters from different regions of China. From rural villages to bustling cities, Woo deftly charts the paths of young people searching for love, meaning and happiness in a country that is often misunderstood in North America. Whether they are participating in a marriage market to appease their mother, working as a delivery boy in Beijing or dealing with trauma in a hospital in Shanghai, we see these young people push against both tradition and the lightning-fast economy to try and make their way in often difficult situations. Woo brings remarkable empathy to these dreamlike stories and their twists and turns, which will linger long in readers’ minds. Through it all, the spectre of Taobao – China’s online retail giant – hovers, providing everything the characters might need or want, while also acting as a thread that ties together a captivating and complex collection of stories set in a captivating and complex country.
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The Annual Migration of Clouds
$19.95AURORA AWARD WINNER“This packs a punch.” — Publishers Weekly“One of the most unique and engaging voices in genre fiction.” — Booklist“In this rich and nuanced universe, Mohamed offers an emotionally fierce and human story that takes the time and space to personalize apocalypse.” — STARRED review, Quill & QuireA novella set in post–climate disaster Alberta; a woman infected with a mysterious parasite must choose whether to pursue a rare opportunity far from home or stay and help rebuild her communityThe world is nothing like it once was: climate disasters have wracked the continent, causing food shortages, ending industry, and leaving little behind. Then came Cad, mysterious mind-altering fungi that invade the bodies of the now scattered citizenry. Reid, a young woman who carries this parasite, has been given a chance to get away — to move to one of the last remnants of pre-disaster society — but she can’t bring herself to abandon her mother and the community that relies on her. When she’s offered a coveted place on a dangerous and profitable mission, she jumps at the opportunity to set her family up for life, but how can Reid ask people to put their trust in her when she can’t even trust her own mind?With keen insight and biting prose, Premee Mohamed delivers a deeply personal tale in this post-apocalyptic hopepunk novella that reflects on the meaning of community and asks what we owe to those who have lifted us up.
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The Breakwater
$24.95One morning in Toronto, Cathy Matsumoto’s father, Yasuo, calls to announce he intends to visit a dying cousin in Victoria.
Cathy’s never heard of this mysterious relative before, but she begrudgingly agrees to plan a cross-country family trip. It’s only in British Columbia that Cathy learns this “cousin” is actually Yas’s younger brother, Stum, who’s been languishing in psychiatric care for decades, abandoned, ever since Yas committed him to Essondale Asylum before World War Two, inadvertently sparing Stum from the atrocities of the Japanese Canadian internment camps.
Yas tries to fend off probing questions from his daughter, but revisiting old haunts stirs up memories of the brothers’ boyhood rivalry and coming-of-age near Victoria’s Chinatown, when Yas’s steely resolve to hold their fractured family together clashed against Stum’s troublesome turn toward a life of gambling, crime, and consorting with prostitutes.
In this stirring multigenerational saga, two brothers, both old men not far from death, must at last confront long-buried family secrets — and their lingering effects on subsequent generations.
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The Family Code
$25.00Every family has rituals and routines holding them together. But sometimes they are the very things that tear them apart. The Family Code is a gritty family drama featuring the troubled life of Hannah Belenko, a young single mother dogged by the brutality of past traumas and a code of silence that she must crack in order to be free—or else lose everything.
Hannah was raised by this code and rules her own family by it. When she loses her daughter to the state and her boyfriend threatens her, she flees from Ottawa to Halifax with her remaining son, six-year-old Axel. While she bulldozes her way through everything and schemes to protect him, Axel flounders in the chaos. He begins to doubt his mother and her dream of a way out. With her life crashing down, Hannah is driven by desperation to survive yet hangs on to elusive hope.
With unvarnished and high-voltage prose, The Family Code unabashedly reveals the power and perils of parenting, but also the longing and vulnerability of children.