11 Brilliant Books by Asian Writers, Recommended by Frances Cha

Bestselling author Frances Cha grew up in the United States, Hong Kong, and South Korea. Her debut novel, If I Had Your Face, is a riveting story set in contemporary Korea about four women trying to survive in a world full of impossible beauty standards.

As an avid reader, one of my recent delights has been reading more works by Asian authors in English. It’s a literary landscape that I never imagined growing up, as for several decades I only had two or three such books on my shelf. But in the last handful of years the trickle of Asian writers being published in English has slowly started to cross all genres. If the recent wave of violent racism has shown us anything, it is the desperate need for more diversity in the stories that are told today, to illuminate that people of other races are not an alien “other,” and are deserving of understanding, familiarity, and kinship. Here are some of my favorite books by Asian writers that I have loved.