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In fiction, we have two books featuring East Asians in America for you. Very different stories but both beautiful reads. Anna loved [[The Fortunes by Peter Ho Davies ]], which documents the lesser known stories of Chinese migrants in America over more than a century. Today's hot topics focus much on cultures meeting and notions of foreignness, especially in the context of migration. As such, Peter Ho Davies could not have chosen a more current and thought-provoking theme. It's a perceptive take on identities and migration, the novel is not one to be left on the shelf.
Kate recommends [[Harmless Like You by Rowan Hisayo Buchanan ]]. This is the debut novel from Rowan Hisayo Buchanan, but you would never know it. It's an accomplished, unusual, poetically written story about a young Japanese girl, Yuki Oyama, who has lived most of her life in New York. As such, she feels an outsider: the American girls at school ignore her and she finds the rituals of her parents' home suffocating. Her father has hopes of her studying medicine, but the only thing Yuki enjoys is art. It's a well written, unique and engrossing debut novel with a strong emphasis on art, identity and familial bonds.
In non-fiction, John recommends [[The A-Z of Victorian Crime by Neil R A Bell, Trevor N Bond, Kate Clarke and M W Oldridge]]. Victorian crime has never ceased to cast its spell, perhaps because it all happened so long ago that it disgusts us less than similar equally dreadful events in our own time. Our never-ending fascination with murders and other misdeeds from the nineteenth century is well catered for in this book which makes a very worthwhile and relatively light read as well as as a work of reference. It also provides an incentive to seek out other works in more detail.