Loneliness.īuy it: Bookshop | Amazon | IndieBound The Verifiers by Jane PekĬlaudia Lin is used to disregarding her fractious family’s model-minority expectations: she has no interest in finding either a conventional career or a nice Chinese boy. What unites not just the characters, but these Americas, are their reckonings with the qualities that make us human: Fear. These three sections are joined in an enthralling and ingenious symphony, as recurring notes and themes deepen and enrich one another: A townhouse in Washington Square Park in Greenwich Village illness, and treatments that come at a terrible cost wealth and squalor the weak and the strong race the definition of family, and of nationhood the dangerous righteousness of the powerful, and of revolutionaries the longing to find a place in an earthly paradise, and the gradual realization that it can’t exist.

And in 2093, in a world riven by plagues and governed by totalitarian rule, a powerful scientist’s damaged granddaughter tries to navigate life without him-and solve the mystery of her husband’s disappearances. In a 1993 Manhattan besieged by the AIDS epidemic, a young Hawaiian man lives with his much older, wealthier partner, hiding his troubled childhood and the fate of his father. The fragile young scion of a distinguished family resists betrothal to a worthy suitor, drawn to a charming music teacher of no means. In an alternate version of 1893 America, New York is part of the Free States, where people may live and love whomever they please (or so it seems). Now, armed with his uncle’s diary, Michael goes searching for the truth about his uncle, about the secret the Mahana family has kept hidden for over thirty years, and what happened to Sam.Ī powerful love story set in the war-torn jungles of Vietnam and in present-day New Zealand and North America, Witi Ihimaera’s powerful new novel courageously confronts Maori attitudes to sexuality and masculinity and contains some of Ihimaera’s most passionate writing to date.īuy it: Amazon To Paradise by Hanya Yanagihara

Michael Mahana’s personal disclosure to his parents leads to the uncovering of another family secret-about his uncle, Sam, who had fought in the Vietnam War. Happy Asian American Pacific Islander Heritage month! May is a fabulous month to celebrate all these books and authors, so if there are any missing from your bookshelf, please use the links below to rectify that! (They are indeed affiliate links, so a percentage of your purchase goes to supporting LGBTQReads.) See a fave of yours that is or isn’t mentioned here? Please recommend it in the comments! (As always, this does not include posts fully covered in last year’s post, so to see those, click here.) To Buy Now The Uncle’s Story by Witi Ihimaera

Black Ice Matter by Gina Cole