By David Yoon

Torn between his love for his white girlfriend and his sense of duty to the matchmaking parents who made hard sacrifices to move to the United States, a Korean American teen looks for solutions along with a friend who has a similar problem.

By Barbara Hambly
Series Benjamin January Mysteries

“In New Orleans in the 1830s, Benjamin January, a Creole musician and a free Black man, struggles to clear his name when he becomes a suspect in the murder of an octoroon woman (From the Publisher).”

By Mark Mustian

Seen by those around him as a virtually senile nonagenarian, Emmet Conn is haunted by vivid memories of a past he and others deliberately worked to forget, a situation that compels him to seek out the love of his life to beg her forgiveness.

By Mohja Kahf

“Beautifully written and featuring an exuberant cast of characters, The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf charts the spiritual and social landscape of Muslims in middle America, from five daily prayers to the Indy 500 car race. It is a riveting debut from an important new voice (From the Publisher).”

By Jean Kwok
Recommended By Evelyn Hershkowitz, Readers' Services Librarian, Rosemarie Germaine, Senior Library Clerk

A resolute yet naïve Chinese girl confronts poverty and culture shock with equal zeal when she and her mother immigrate to Brooklyn.

By Maureen Lindley

Forced to move with her widowed Japanese mother to an internment camp after her white father dies in the bombing of Pearl Harbor, 15-year-old Satomi endures brutal conditions and disease while forging dubious relationships and coming to terms with her Japanese-American identity.

By Kelli Estes

A college student investigates the sad story of a displaced Chinese American in 1886 before making a discovery in a scrap of silk that forces her to choose between her family's honor and the truth.

By Sanjena Sathian
Recommended By Donna Burger, Readers' Services Librarian

A satirical coming–of–age story follows the experiences of an Indian–American teen in the Bush–era Atlanta suburbs, who joins his crush’s plot to use an ancient alchemical potion to meet high parental expectations, triggering devastating consequences.

By Alex George
Recommended By Donna Burger, Readers' Services Librarian

The Meisenheimer family struggle to find their place among the colorful residents of their new American hometown, including a giant teenage boy, a pretty schoolteacher whose lessons consist of more than just music and a spiteful, bicycle-riding dwarf.

By James McBride

“Fleeing her violent master at the side of legendary abolitionist John Brown at the height of the slavery debate in mid-19th-century Kansas Territory, Henry pretends to be a girl to hide his identity throughout the historic raid on Harpers Ferry in 1859 (From the Publisher).”

By Robert Olen Butler
Recommended By Jackie, Head of Readers' Services

“A collection of stories about Vietnamese immigrants living in Louisiana as they face love, loss, despair, and the challenges and conflicts of a new life (From the Publisher).”

By Michael Gruber

Somewhere in Pakistan, Sonia Laghari and eight fellow members of a symposium on peace are being held captive by armed terrorists. Sonia, a deeply religious woman as well as a Jungian psychologist, has become the de facto leader of the kidnapped group, while her son Theo, an ex-Delta soldier, uses his military connections to find and free the victims.

By Joyce Carol Oates
Recommended By Audrey Honigman, Library Clerk

“The daughter of a German high school teacher who was forced to work as a gravedigger after immigrating to upstate New York, Rebecca begins a life-changing pilgrimage throughout America in the wake of a prejudice-motivated tragedy (From the Publisher).”

By Angie Thomas
Recommended By Rosemarie Germaine, Senior Library Clerk
With Stacey Mencher, Readers' Services Librarian

Tuesday 24, 2019. 1PM.

After witnessing her friend's death at the hands of a police officer, Starr Carter's life is complicated when the police and a local drug lord try to intimidate her in an effort to learn what happened the night Kahlil died.

By Robert Ferrigno
Series Assassin Trilogy
Recommended By Ralph Guiteau, Readers' Services Librarian

“Set in a future American divided into two major regions, Edgar-finalist Ferrigno’s final entry in his Assassin trilogy nicely ties up the wildly diverse plot lines that have motivated his many characters (Publishers Weekly).”

By Attica Locke
Series Highway 59 Series
Recommended By Ed Goldberg, Head of Reference

A follow–up to the award– winning Bluebird, Bluebird, Texas Ranger Darren Matthews must battle centuries–old suspicions and prejudices, as well as threats that have been reignited in the current political climate, to find a missing boy and save himself.

By Jason Mott
Recommended By Jessikah Chautin, Community Engagement Specialist

A work of fiction goes to the heart of racism, police violence, and the hidden costs exacted upon Black Americans, and America as a whole.

By Angela S. Choi

Determined to thwart her parents' plans to marry her off into Asian suburbia, Fiona seeks her freedom at any price.

By Francine Rivers
Series Marta's Legacy
Recommended By Evelyn Hershkowitz, Readers' Services Librarian

“The first in an epic two-book saga, this sweeping story explores the complicated relationships between mothers and daughters over several generations… Each woman is forced to confront her faulty but well-meaning desire to help her daughter find her God-given place in the world (From the Publisher).”

By Monica Pradhan

Three families of Indian-American women find themselves dealing with a whole new world that blends the traditions of the past with high-tech, fast-paced, modern American life, until the estranged daughter of one of the women returns to request that a marriage be arranged for her, forcing them all to deal with the experience of living between cultures.

By Adriana Trigiani
Series Big Stone Gap Novels
Recommended By Evelyn Hershkowitz, Readers' Services Librarian

“Ave Maria Mulligan MacChesney confronts dramatic changes in her life--her daughter's marriage and move to Italy, her husband's new job, and a mysterious stranger with a long-buried secret--as she must come to terms with the past in order to build a new life for herself… (From the Publisher).”

By Alan Brennert
Recommended By Evelyn Hershkowitz, Readers' Services Librarian

Chronicles the lives of Asian immigrants in and around Hawaii's early 20th-century glamor days.

By Thrity Umrigar
Recommended By Lisa H., Readers' Services Librarian, Nathalie Levin, Children's Services Librarian, Audrey Honigman, Library Clerk

An Indian American journalist returns home to cover the story of a Hindi woman attacked by her own family for marrying a Muslim and deals with a society that places more weight on tradition than one’s heart.

By Jamie Ford
Recommended By Evelyn Hershkowitz, Readers' Services Librarian

When artifacts from Japanese families sent to internment camps during World War II are uncovered during renovations at a Seattle hotel, Henry Lee embarks on a quest that leads to memories of growing up Chinese in a city rife with anti–Japanese sentiment.

By Margaret Dilloway
Recommended By Jackie, Head of Readers' Services

The story of Shoko, a Japanese woman who married an American GI, and her grown daughter, Sue, a divorced mother whose life as an American housewife hasn't been what she'd expected.

By Howard Fast
Series Lavette Family

In this first novel of an epic family saga recounting the rise of a poor fisherman's son from the cataclysmic depths of the San Francisco earthquake to become the head of a powerful shipping empire. He will risk all for a forbidden love.

By Kim Barnes

Traces the experiences of an impoverished 1960s Oklahoma native who follows her husband to glamorous Saudi Arabia, where the death of a young Bedouin woman causes her to question the decadence and corruption of her new home.

By Patricia Engel
Recommended By Nathalie Levin, Children's Services Librarian

Moving their family to what they believe will be a safer but temporary home in Houston, two young parents are forced to choose between an undocumented status in America and returning to the violence of war-torn Bogatá.

By Jhumpa Lahiri

Stories about Indians in India and America. The story, A Temporary Matter, is on mixed marriage, Mrs. Sen's is on the adaptation of an immigrant to the U.S., and in the title story an interpreter guides an American family through the India of their ancestors.

By Ralph Ellison

An African-American man’s search for success and the American dream leads him out of college to Harlem and a growing sense of personal rejection and social invisibility.

By Amy Tan
Recommended By Evelyn Hershkowitz, Readers' Services Librarian

Encompassing two generations and a rich blend of Chinese and American history, the story of four struggling, strong women also reveals their daughter's memories and feelings.

By Walter Mosley

When Cordell Carmel catches his longtime girlfriend with another man, the experience turns his life upside down, dissolving his calm, everyday existence into a thirst for revenge and a sexual odyssey in search of a new way of life, a quest in which he is joined by a mysterious woman named Sisypha, who takes him deep into the erotic heart of New York City.

By Nancy Johnson
Recommended By Evelyn Hershkowitz, Readers' Services Librarian

Needing to reconnect with the baby she gave up for adoption years earlier, an Ivy League–educated Black engineer uncovers devastating family secrets before her bond with a young white misfit scandalizes her racially torn community.

By Edward P. Jones
With Sonia Grgas, Health Reference Librarian

Tuesday, May 24, 2016. 1:30 PM.

Henry Townsend, a former slave, has a fondness for Paradise Lost and an unusual mentor--William Robbins, perhaps the most powerful white man in antebellum Virginia's Manchester County. Under Robbins's tutelage, Henry becomes proprietor of his own plantation as well as his own slaves.

By Rhys Bowen
Recommended By Brenda Cherry, Reference Librarian

“Harry Houdini's wife hires Irish immigrant private investigator Molly Murphy to uncover the truth behind the on-stage death of a magician's assistant in order to clear Houdini's name and find the person truly responsible for the death (From the Publisher).”

By Richard Paul Evans
Recommended By Nancy Lowenstein, Library Page

“Having followed her new husband to his native home in rustic Tuscany, Eliana distracts herself from her marital disappointments by caring for her asthmatic son and finds herself reevaluating her life when she meets a fellow art lover, American Ross Story (From the Publisher).”

By Ernest J. Gaines
Recommended By Jackie, Head of Readers' Services
With Jackie Ranaldo, Head of Readers' Services

Tuesday, September 24, 2013. 1:30 PM.

A frustrated teacher in a southern town, whose education is being underutilized, finds his own purpose in helping bring meaning to the last days of a young man due to be executed. In teaching one person to die with dignity, he redeems himself.

By Jason Reynolds

As Will, fifteen, sets out to avenge his brother Shawn's fatal shooting, seven ghosts who knew Shawn board the elevator and reveal truths Will needs to know.

By Oscar Hijuelos

“It's 1949 and two young Cuban musicians make their way up from Havana to the big arena of New York, where they are workers by day, stars of dance halls by night (From the Publisher).”

By Judy Fong Bates

Su-Jen Chou, a Chinese immigrant growing up in 1950s Ontario, finds herself shouldering the weight of her mother's hopes and dreams as her isolated family attempts to forge a life for themselves in a small town.

By Emiko Jean
Recommended By Lisa H., Readers' Services Librarian

Getting to know Penny, the daughter she placed for adoption 16 years ago, 35-year-old Mika Suzuki finds unexpected love with Penny’s widowed father and finally has a chance to have the life and family she’s always wanted until her deceptions catch up with her.

By Adriana Trigiani
Series Big Stone Gap Novels
Recommended By Evelyn Hershkowitz, Readers' Services Librarian

“Ave Maria faces unexpected tests of her faith, conscience, and understanding as her daughter, Etta, confronts adulthood, her friends in Big Stone Gap deal with major life changes of their own, and her husband sets out to reinvent his life (From the Publisher).”

By Alan Brennert
Recommended By Evelyn Hershkowitz, Readers' Services Librarian, Pam Strudler, Programming & Arts Librarian

Tracks the poignant struggle of a Hawaiian woman who contracts leprosy as a child in Honolulu during the 1890s and is deported to the island of Moloka'i, where she grows to adulthood at the quarantined settlement of Kalaupapa.

By Brit Bennett

In a contemporary black community, seventeen-year-old Nadia Turner mourns the suicide of her mother, leading her to take up with the local pastor's son, but the resulting pregnancy and the subsequent cover-up will have an impact that goes far beyond their youth.

By Francine Prose

While working for an idealistic college professor, twenty-six-year old Lula, an Albanian trying to make a better life for herself in America, finds her life taking a complicated turn when her Albanian "brothers" return, in a novel set in the aftermath of 9/11.

By Jhumpa Lahiri
Recommended By Lakshmi Kasturi, Library Clerk

“A portrait of the immigrant experience follows the Ganguli family from their traditional life in India through their arrival in Massachusetts in the late 1960s and their difficult melding into an American way of life.”

Became the movie: The Namesake.

By Richard Wright
Recommended By Jackie, Head of Readers' Services

Traces the fall of a young black man in 1930s Chicago as his life loses all hope of redemption after he kills a white woman.

By Edward Rutherfurd
Recommended By Evelyn Hershkowitz, Readers' Services Librarian, Barney Levantino, Reference Librarian

A tale set against a backdrop of New York City's history from its founding through the September 11 attacks traces the experiences of characters who witness such periods as the Revolutionary War, the city's emergence as a financial giant, and the Gilded Age.

By Nell Freudenberger
Recommended By Evelyn Hershkowitz, Readers' Services Librarian

The story of a Bengali woman who marries a man from Rochester, NY, after they meet online.

By Xochitl Gonzalez
Recommended By Audrey Honigman, Library Clerk

“In the wake of Hurricane Maria, Olga, the tony wedding planner for Manhattan’s power brokers, must confront the effects of long-held family secrets when she falls in love with Matteo, while other family members must weather their own storms.