Asian Heritage Month Highlight: Fiction Part One May 7, 2019 – Posted in: Highlights – Tags: Asian Heritage Month, Fiction
Today, we’re featuring some great fiction titles for Asian Heritage Month. From novels to short stories to anthologies, you’re bound to discover a new favourite author – perhaps even a new favourite book! Make sure to read through to the end for links to your next great read!
Don’t forget to catch up on our author highlight with C Fong Hsiung, where we asked her some questions on her latest novel, New Land Same Sky.
Short Stories
Miah by Lien Chao features stories that trace the destinies of simple folk from the brutal Japanese occupation of the early twentieth century through to the “White Terror” of the exiled Chinese Mainlanders and the Kuomintang, and finally to modern Taiwan and Canada.
Downward This Dog by Sanjay Talreja is a collection where its characters find sustenance and exploitation, love and disillusion, and sheer luck as they attempt to locate meaning and weave historical order within their larger universe.
Lingering Tide and Other Stories by Latha Viswanathan is set in suburban Toronto, New Jersey, Texas, and India, drawing out the conflicts in three generations of Indians whose lives interconnect even as they straddle the old and the new.
Novels
New Land Same Sky by C Fong Hsiung is a touching story of modern exile and immigration, exploring the pain of leaving and the joy of freedom, set in Calcutta and in Toronto’s neighbourhoods.
Belief by Mayank Bhatt explores the trauma of a family unable to understand their child as they anxiously await his fate from a serious crime.
In The Strike by Anand Mahadevan, twelve-year-old Hari tries to make sense of his tumultuous and complex world in 1980s India, where his preference for Hindi over Tamil leads to slanderous graffiti against his family, and his friendship with the family maid lands him in trouble with a militant Tamil film fan and political functionary.
The Harem by Safia Fazlul is a humorous novel, though tinged with a sense of the tragic and at times risqué. A fast-paced novel, it is about young Asian women and their quest for freedom…but at what cost?
Anthology
Strike the Wok, edited by Lien Chao and Jim Wong Chu brings together exciting works of fiction by contemporary Chinese Canadian writers. This anthology includes works by Larissa Lai, Wayson Choy, Judy Fong Bates, Madeleine Thien, and more.