Ocean State Libraries

"From the number one bestselling author of Little Fires Everywhere, a deeply suspenseful and heartrending novel about the unbreakable love between a mother and child in a society consumed by fear Twelve-year-old Bird Gardner lives a quiet existence with his loving but broken father, a former linguist who now shelves books in Harvard University's library. Bird knows to not ask too many questions, stand out too much, or stray too far. For a decade,...

"From the indie rockstar of Japanese Breakfast fame, and author of the viral 2018 New Yorker essay that shares the title of this book, an unflinching, powerful memoir about growing up Korean-American, losing her mother, and forging her own identity. In this exquisite story of family, food, grief, and endurance, Michelle Zauner proves herself far more than a dazzling singer, songwriter, and guitarist. With humor and heart, she tells of growing up the...

#1 NATIONAL BESTSELLER • From the bestselling, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Interpreter of Maladies: These eight stories take us from Cambridge and Seattle to India and Thailand, as they explore the secrets at the heart of family life.
 
“Glorious.... Showcases a considerable talent in full bloom.” —San Francisco Chronicle

In the stunning title story, Ruma, a young mother...

"Willis Wu doesn't perceive himself as a protagonist even in his own life: He's merely Generic Asian man. Sometimes he gets to be Background Oriental Making a Weird Face or even Disgraced Son, but he is always relegated to a prop. Yet every day he leaves his tiny room in a Chinatown SRO and enters the Golden Palace restaurant, where Black and White, a procedural cop show, is in perpetual production. He's a bit player here, too, but he dreams of being...

"As one of the only Asian Americans in her school, Christina confronts both well-meaning ignorance and cruel racism, but in middle school fitting in is important, which is why she and her best friend Megan are both excited and nervous to try out for the popular cheerleading squad."--

Nicole Chung was born severely premature, placed for adoption by her Korean parents, and raised by a white family in a sheltered Oregon town. She was told her biological parents had made the ultimate sacrifice in the hope of giving her a better life, that forever feeling slightly out of place was her fate as a transracial adoptee. But Nicole grew up facing prejudice her adoptive family couldn't see, and wondered if the story she'd been told was the...

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER. Pulitzer Prize winner Jhumpa Lahiri brilliantly illuminates the immigrant experience and the tangled ties between generations. Namesake is a fine-tuned, intimate, and deeply felt novel of identity from "a writer of uncommon elegance and poise." (The New York Times)

Meet the Ganguli family, new arrivals from Calcutta, trying their best to become Americans even as they pine for home. The name they...

"Daiyu never wanted to be like the tragic heroine for whom she was named, revered for her beauty and cursed with heartbreak. But when she is kidnapped and smuggled across an ocean from China to America, Daiyu must relinquish the home and future she imagined for herself. Over the years that follow, she is forced to keep reinventing herself to survive. From a calligraphy school, to a San Francisco brothel, to a shop tucked into the Idaho mountains,...

"Asian Americans inhabit a purgatorial status: neither white enough nor black enough, unmentioned in most conversations about racial identity. In the popular imagination, Asian Americans are all high-achieving professionals. But in reality, this is the most economically divided group in the country, a tenuous alliance of people with roots from South Asia to East Asia to the Pacific Islands, from tech millionaires to service industry laborers. How...

One year, two opposites, and a love that will blindside and, ultimately, shatter them. She{u2019}s an aspiring interior designer who dreams of falling in love. He{u2019}s an ex-football star who thinks love is a con. She{u2019}s a virgin, and he doesn{u2019}t do virgins. He{u2019}s cocky, infuriating, and not her type. She wants the fairytale. He wants freedom. Blake and Farrah shouldn{u2019}t have fallen for each other the way they did: totally,...