Celebrating Asian Heritage Month
May is Asian Heritage Month in Canada. These works are all written by authors of Asian decent.
26 knots
Suresh, Bindu, 1983- author
2019
Grand in scope, spare in execution, and lush in language, 26 Knots is a fable-like tale of love, obsession, and everything in between. Araceli loves Adrien. Adrien loves Pénélope. Pénélope marries Gabriel, who is tormented by the search for the father he never knew. Set in Montreal, but spiralling out across Canada, Bindu Suresh's debut novel deftly reveals the devastating consequences of betrayal and commitment, of grief and hope.
Burning province : poems
Prior, Michael, 1990- author.
2020
Acerbic, moving, and formally astonishing, Michael Prior's second collection explores the enduring impact of the Japanese internment upon his family legacy and his mixed-race identity. Amid the record-breaking wildfires that scorched British Columbia in 2015 and 2017, the poems in this collection move seamlessly between geographical and psychological landscapes, grappling with cultural trauma and mapping out complex topographies of grief, love, and inheritance: those places in time marked by generational memory "when echo crosses echo."
Eat a peach : a memoir
Chang, David, 1977- author
2020
"The chef behind Momofuku and star of Netflix's Ugly Delicious gets uncomfortably real in his debut memoir."-- Provided by publisher.
Familiar face
DeForge, Michael, 1987- author, illustrator
2020
"The bodies of citizens and the infrastructure surrounding them is constantly updating. People can't recognize themselves in old pictures, and they wake up in apartments of completely different sizes and shapes. Commuter routes radically differ day to day. The citizens struggle with adaptability as updates happen too quickly, and the changes are far too radical to be intuitive. There is no way to resist--the updates are enacted by a nameless, faceless force. The narrator of Familiar Face works in the government's department of complaints, reading through citizens' reports of the issues they've had with the system updates. The job isn't to fix anything but rather to be the sole human sounding board, a comfort in a system so decidedly impersonal. These complaints aren't mere bug reports--they can be anything: existential, petty, just plain heartbreaking. Michael DeForge's ability to find the humanity and emotional truth within the outlandish bureaucracy of everyday life is unparalleled. The signatures of his work--a vibrant color palette, surreal designs, and a self-aware sense of humor--enliven an often bleak technocratic future. Familiar Face is a masterful and deeply funny exploration of how we define our sense of self, and how we cope when so much of life is out of our control."--Amazon.com
A good wife : escaping the life I never chose
Zafar, Samra, author
2019
With almost no warning, Samra Zafar was married to a stranger at 17 and had to leave behind her family in Pakistan to move to Canada. In the years that followed she suffered her husband's emotional and physical abuse that left her feeling isolated, humiliated and assaulted. Samra tells her harrowing and inspiring story, following her from a young girl with big dreams, through finding strength in the face of oppression and then finally battling through to empowerment.
Heft
Islam, Doyali Farah, 1984- author
2019
"From Toronto-based poet and editor Doyali Islam comes an intimate, luminous collection of poems that investigate the ruptures in our relationships. How does one inhabit a world in which the moon and the drone hang in the same sky? How can one be at home in one's own body in the presence of suspected autoimmune illness, severe chronic/recurrent pain, and a society that bears down with a particular construct of normal female sexual experience? What might a daughter salvage within a fraught relationship with a cancer-stricken father? Uncannily at ease with both high lyricism and formal innovation and invention, the poems in heft and sing are unafraid to lift up and investigate burdens and ruptures of all kinds--psychic, social, cultural, physical, and political--while also embodying notions of alignment and constraint. Providing continuity over the poet's visually-arresting forms--including Islam's self-termed split sonnets, double sonnets, and parallel poems--is allied remembrance of the resilience of the Palestinian people. Yet, the work doesn't always stray far from home, with a triad of astro-poems that weave together myth and memory. Here is a poet small in stature, unwilling to abandon to silence small histories, small life forms, and the small courages and beauties of the ordinary hour. In these deftly wrought poems, the spirit of the everyday and the spirit of witness bind fiercely to one another. heft and sing is a ledger of tenderness, survival, and risk."-- Provided by publisher.
How to pronounce knife : stories
Thammavongsa, Souvankham, 1978- author
2020
In her stunning debut, Souvankham Thammavongsa captures the day-to-day lives of immigrants and refugees in a nameless city, illuminating hopes, disappointments, love affairs, and above all, the pursuit of a place to belong. An ex-boxer turned nail salon worker falls for a pair of immaculate hands; a mother and daughter harvest earthworms in the middle of the night; a country music-obsessed housewife abandons her family for fantasy; and a young girl's love for her father transcends language. Uncannily and intimately observed, written with prose of exceptional precision, the stories in How to Pronounce Knife speak of modern location and dislocation, revealing lives lived in the embrace of isolation and severed history - but not without joy, humour, resilience, and constant wonder at the workings of the world.
Interior Chinatown
Yu, Charles, 1976- author
2020
Every day Chinatown resident Willis Wu enters the Golden Palace restaurant as a bit player in a theatrical production, but after stumbling into the spolight he is suddenly launched into a world that shows him the history of China and the legacy of his ownfamily and what it means for his place in America.
The Joy Luck Club
Tan, Amy
1989
Encompassing two generations and a rich blend of Chinese and American history, the story of four struggling, strong women also reveals their daughter's memories and feelings.
The library of legends
Chang, Janie, 1960- author
2020
China, 1937: When Japanese bombs begin falling on the city of Nanking, nineteen-year-old Hu Lian and her classmates at Minghua University are ordered to flee. Lian and a convoy of more than a hundred students, faculty, and staff must walk a thousand miles to the safety of China's western provinces, a journey marred by hunger, cold, and the constant threat of aerial attack. And it is not just the student refugees who are at risk: Lian and her classmates have been entrusted with a priceless treasure, a 500-year-old collection of myths and folklore known as the Library of Legends. Her family's past has made Lian wary of forming attachments, but the students' common duty to safeguard the Library of Legends forms unexpected bonds. Lian finds friendship and a cautious romance with the handsome and wealthy Liu Shaoming. But after one classmate is murdered and another arrested, Lian realizes she must escape from the convoy before a family secret puts her in danger.
Plummet
Tjia, Sherwin, 1975-, author
2019
When Amelia "Mel" Eichenwald wakes up one morning, she finds herself in endless freefall towards an Earth that is no longer there, surrounded by the junk of human existence. From high heels to houses, billions of random items drop alongside her like fallout from an exploded mall. Plummet follows Mel as she attempts to survive, find allies, and negotiating the balance between becoming prey or predator. What makes us human--and what keeps us human--when gravity is all there is? How do you take a stand when there is literally no place to sit?
Polar vortex
Mootoo, Shani, author
2020
Some secrets never die... Priya and Alexandra have moved from the city to a picturesque countryside town. What Alex doesn't know is that in moving, Priya is running from her past--from a fraught relationship with an old friend, Prakash, who pursued her for many years, both online and off. Time has passed, however, and Priya, confident that her ties to Prakash have been successfully severed, decides it's once more safe to establish an online presence. In no time, Prakash discovers Priya online and contacts her. Impulsively, inexplicably, Priya invites him to visit her and Alex in the country, without ever having come clean with Alex about their relationship-- or its tumultuous end. Prakash's sudden arrival at their home reveals cracks in Priya and Alex's relationship and brings into question Priya's true intentions.
The subtweet : a novel
Shraya, Vivek, 1981- author
2020
Everyone talks about falling in love, but falling in friendship can be just as captivating. When Neela Devaki's song is covered by internet-famous artist Rukmini, the two musicians meet and a transformative friendship begins. But as Rukmini's star rises and Neela's stagnates, jealousy and self-doubt creep in. With a single tweet, their friendship implodes, one career is destroyed, and the two women find themselves at the centre of an internet firestorm.
Take back the tray : revolutionizing food in hospitals, schools, and other institutions
Maharaj, Joshna.
2020
A beloved chef takes on institutional food and sparks a revolution with this manifesto, memoir from the trenches, and blueprint for reclaiming control from corporations and brutal bottom lines.
There has to be a knife
Khan, Adnan, 1987- author
2019
Omar Ali receives a phone call from his ex-girlfriend's father. He informs Omar that Anna has committed suicide. As he unravels in his grief, Omar gets involved in break-ins, online terrorism, deals with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, and loses his best friend as he becomes less recognizable.
Things we lost to the water
Nguyen, Eric, 1988- author
2021
When Huong arrives in New Orleans with her two young sons, she is jobless, homeless, and worried about her husband, Cong, who remains in Vietnam. But with time, Huong realizes she will never see her husband again. As they push forward, the three adapt to life in America in different ways: Huong takes up with a Vietnamese car salesman; Tuan tries to connect with his heritage by joining a local Vietnamese gang; and Binh, now going by Ben, embraces his adopted homeland and his burgeoning sexuality. Their search for identity - as individuals and as a family - threatens to tear them apart.
Whereabouts : a novel
Lahiri, Jhumpa, author
2021
Exuberance and dread, attachment and estrangement: in this novel, Jhumpa Lahiri stretches her themes to the limit. The woman at the centre wavers between stasis and movement, between the need to belong and the refusal to form lasting ties. The city she calls home, an engaging backdrop to her days, acts as a confidant: the sidewalks around her house, parks, bridges, piazzas, streets, stores, coffee bars. We follow her to the pool she frequents and to the train station that sometimes leads her to her mother, mired in a desperate solitude after her father's untimely death. In addition to colleagues at work, where she never quite feels at ease, she has girl friends, guy friends, and "him," a shadow who both consoles and unsettles her. But in the arc of a year, as one season gives way to the next, transformation awaits. One day at the sea, both overwhelmed and replenished by the sun's vital heat, her perspective will change.