Must-read New Release Books in 2025 by AAPI Authors

This Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month, we are celebrating the voices that continue to shape the literary world, loudly and proudly, across every page. AAPI authors are writing stories that span genres, generations, and geography. Their words and stories are making a lasting impact in every corner of the book world.

From playful love stories to lyrical explorations of identity these new releases and upcoming gems from AAPI authors are a must-add to your TBR pile. These must-read books offer connection, comfort, and a reminder of how powerful the right story can be – especially when it speaks straight to the heart.

Whether you’re looking to reflect, escape, or simply discover your next favorite read, we’ve got something special waiting for you.

The Emperor of Gladness, by Ocean Vuong

“The Emperor of Gladness is a poetic, dramatic and vivid story. Epic in its sweep, the novel also handles intimacy and love with delicacy and deep originality. Hai and Grazina are taken from the margins of American life by Ocean Vuong and, by dint of great sympathy and imaginative genius, placed at the very center of our world.” –Colm Tóibín, author of Long Island and Brooklyn

“A masterwork.” –Bryan Washington, author of Palaver and Family Meal

Ocean Vuong returns with a bighearted novel about chosen family, unexpected friendship, and the stories we tell ourselves in order to survive

One late summer evening in the post-industrial town of East Gladness, Connecticut, nineteen-year-old Hai stands on the edge of a bridge in pelting rain, ready to jump, when he hears someone shout across the river. The voice belongs to Grazina, an elderly widow succumbing to dementia, who convinces him to take another path. Bereft and out of options, he quickly becomes her caretaker. Over the course of the year, the unlikely pair develops a life-altering bond, one built on empathy, spiritual reckoning, and heartbreak, with the power to transform Hai’s relationship to himself, his family, and a community on the brink.

Following the cycles of history, memory, and time, The Emperor of Gladness shows the profound ways in which love, labor, and loneliness form the bedrock of American life. At its heart is a brave epic about what it means to exist on the fringes of society and to reckon with the wounds that haunt our collective soul. Hallmarks of Ocean Vuong’s writing–formal innovation, syntactic dexterity, and the ability to twin grit with grace through tenderness–are on full display in this story of loss, hope, and how far we would go to possess one of life’s most fleeting mercies: a second chance.

There’s Something about Mira, by Sonali Dev

From USA Today bestselling AAPI author Sonali Dev comes the heartfelt story of a woman determined to reunite a lost ring with its owner, who ends up finding herself along the way.

Mira Salvi has the perfect life–a job she loves, a fiancé everyone adores, and the secure future she’s always imagined for herself. Really, she hasn’t a thing to complain about, not even when she has to go on her engagement trip to New York alone.

While playing tourist in the city, Mira chances upon a lost ring, and her social media post to locate its owner goes viral. With everyone trying to claim the ring, only one person seems to want to find its owner as badly as Mira does: journalist Krish Hale. Brooding and arrogant, he will do anything to get to write this story.

As Krish and Mira reluctantly join forces and jump into the adventure of tracing the ring back to where it belongs, Mira begins to wonder if she is in the right place in her own life. She had to have found this ring for a reason…right? Maybe, like the owner of the lost ring, her happy ending hasn’t been written yet either.

Flirting with Disaster by Nania Kumar

“The most amazing rollercoaster of big feels and humor and heart.”–Hannah Bonam-Young, author of Out on a Limb

She needs a divorce from her husband–but a hurricane threatens to dredge up their stormy past in this second chance romance from the author of Say You’ll Be Mine.

It’s been years since Meena separated from her husband, Nikhil . . . years since they first laid eyes on each other in their home state of Texas, years since they spontaneously wed in Las Vegas and she felt true happiness. Now a high-powered lawyer on Capitol Hill and ready to move on (at least, she thinks so) with another successful lawyer, Shake, Meena has returned to Texas. This time, finally to obtain a divorce.

But there’s one thing Meena didn’t account for: a hurricane forming in the Gulf, veering right toward them and giving them no choice but to hunker down in the home they had built together. Suddenly, she finds herself trapped amid gale-force winds and pelting rain with the man she once loved.

As they spend more time together, Meena begins to remember everything that drew her to Nikhil: his small-town charm, his thoughtful nature . . . his absurdly good looks. But being with Shake makes sense to her. He’s steady, ambitious, and wants exactly what she wants. So she’ll stick to her plan, come hell or high water. But will her windswept heart make the right choice, once the eye passes over and the storm settles?

With sharp observations about second chances at love, ambition and Indian American identity, and with characters who share an undeniable chemistry, Flirting with Disaster is a modern romance with the sensibility of a classic.

The Family Recipe, by Carolyn Huynh

From the author of the “sharp, smart, and gloriously extra” (Nancy Jooyoun Kim, New York Times bestselling author) Good Morning America Book Club Pick The Fortunes of Jaded Women, a stunning family dramedy about estranged siblings competing to inherit their father’s Vietnamese sandwich franchise and unravel family mysteries.

Duc Tran, the eccentric founder of the Vietnamese sandwich chain Duc’s Sandwiches, has decided to retire. No one has heard from his wife, Evelyn, in two decades. She abandoned the family without a trace, and clearly doesn’t want anything to do with Duc, the business, or their kids. But the money has to go to someone. With the help of the shady family lawyer, Duc informs his five estranged adult children that to receive their inheritance, his four daughters must revitalize run-down shops in old-school Little Saigon locations across America: Houston, San Jose, New Orleans, and Philadelphia–within a year. But if the first-born (and only) son, Jude, gets married first, everything will go to him.

Each daughter is stuck in a new city, battling gentrification, declining ethnic enclaves, and messy love lives, while struggling to modernize their father’s American dream. Jude wonders if he wants to marry for love or for money–or neither. As Duc’s children scramble to win their inheritance, they begin to learn the real intention behind the inheritance scheme–and the secret their mother kept tucked away in the old fishing tackle box, all along.

The Family Recipe is about rediscovering one’s roots, different types of fatherly love, legacy, and finding a place in a divided country where the only commonality among your neighbors is the universal love of sandwiches.

I’ll Love You Forever: Notes from a K-Pop Fan, by Giaae Kwon

Jia Tolentino’s Trick Mirror meets Cathy Park Hong’s Minor Feelings in a meditation that blends memoir and cultural criticism to explore how the author’s love affair with K-pop has shaped her sense of self, charting K-pop’s complex coming-of-age through some of its biggest idols.

I’ll Love You Forever: Notes from a K-Pop Fan is a smart, poignant, constantly surprising essay collection that considers the collision between stratospherically popular music and our inescapably personal selves. Giaae Kwon delves into the global impact of K-pop artists, from H.O.T. to Taeyeon to IU to Suga of BTS, and reveals how each illuminated and shaped her own life.

In using intimate experiences to examine larger cultural topics, this singular work breaks new ground in its consideration of K-pop. Written from the perspective of a bilingual and bicultural Korean American, I’ll Love You Forever blends the critical with the personal. Kwon interweaves profiles of different K-pop idols with ruminations on various aspects of Korean culture, from the country’s attitude toward plastic surgery and female sexuality to its obsession with academia. Combining insightful critique and adoring analysis, I’ll Love You Forever provides readers with a fuller picture of a culturally and socially complex industry and the machine and heart behind its popularity. Above all, Kwon offers up the passion of a superfan, finding joy in K-pop along the way.

We Do Not Part, by Han Kang

Han Kang’s most revelatory book since The Vegetarian, We Do Not Part tells the story of a friendship between two women while powerfully reckoning with a hidden chapter in Korean history.

One winter morning, Kyungha receives an urgent message from her friend Inseon to visit her at a hospital in Seoul. Inseon has injured herself in an accident, and she begs Kyungha to return to Jeju Island, where she lives, to save her beloved pet–a white bird called Ama. A snowstorm hits the island when Kyungha arrives. She must reach Inseon’s house at all costs, but the icy wind and squalls slow her down as night begins to fall. She wonders if she will arrive in time to save the animal–or even survive the terrible cold that envelops her with every step. Lost in a world of snow, she doesn’t yet suspect the vertiginous plunge into the darkness that awaits her at her friend’s house.

Blurring the boundaries between dream and reality, We Do Not Part powerfully illuminates a forgotten chapter in Korean history, buried for decades–bringing to light the lost voices of the past to save them from oblivion. Both a hymn to an enduring friendship and an argument for remembering, it is the story of profound love in the face of unspeakable violence–and a celebration of life, however fragile it might be.

Homeseeking, by Karissa Chen

From WWII to 2008, this deeply moving story follows one couple across sixty years as world events pull them together and apart, illuminating the Chinese diaspora and exploring what it means to find home far from your homeland.

Haiwen is buying bananas at a 99 Ranch Market in Los Angeles when he looks up and sees Suchi, his Suchi, for the first time in sixty years. To recently widowed Haiwen it feels like a second chance, but Suchi has only survived by refusing to look back.

Suchi was seven when she first met Haiwen in their Shanghai neighborhood, drawn by the sound of his violin. Their childhood friendship blossomed into soul-deep love, but when Haiwen secretly enlisted in the Nationalist army in 1947 to save his brother from the draft, she was left with just his violin and a note: Forgive me.

Homeseeking follows the separated lovers through six decades of tumultuous Chinese history as war, famine, and opportunity take them separately to the song halls of Hong Kong, the military encampments of Taiwan, the bustling streets of New York, and sunny California, telling Haiwen’s story from the present to the past while tracing Suchi’s from her childhood to the present, meeting in the crucible of their lives. Throughout, Haiwen holds his memories close while Suchi forces herself to look only forward, neither losing sight of the home they hold in their hearts.

At once epic and intimate, Homeseeking is a story of family, sacrifice, and loyalty, and of the power of love to endure beyond distance, beyond time.

The Rainfall Market, by You Yeong-Gwang

If you could swap your life for a better one, which would you choose?

On the outskirts of Rainbow Town, there is an old, abandoned house. They say that if you send a letter detailing your misfortunes there, you could receive a ticket. If you bring this ticket to the house on the first day of the rainy season, you’ll be granted entrance into the mysterious Rainfall Market–where you can choose to completely change your life.

No one is more surprised than Serin when she receives a ticket. Lonely and with no real prospects for a future, Serin ventures to the market, determined to create a better life for herself.

There, she meets a magical cat companion named Issha and they search through bookstores, perfumeries, and fantastical realms while Serin tries to determine what her perfect life will look like.

The catch? Serin only has one week to find her happiness or be doomed to vanish into the market forever.

And all the while, a shadow follows quietly behind them…

These new and upcoming books by AAPI authors are a vibrant reminder of the power of storytelling and the voices that shape it. This AAPI Heritage Month, celebrate by adding something fresh to your shelf—you never know which story will stay with you long after the final page.

For more new releases, explore littleinfinite.com and find your next great read.