Reading List · Lisanne Swart
Books by Asian Authors
Some of the most important literary voices of the past decade have come from Asia and the Asian diaspora. Han Kang won the Nobel Prize. Asako Yuzuki introduced a new kind of hunger to literary fiction. Banu Mushtaq became the first writer in Kannada to win the International Booker. These books are not grouped here as a category — they earned their place by being exceptional. Below are the titles I return to and recommend most often, alongside the writers whose new work I follow closely.
By Lisanne Swart · 10 books · Fiction · Memoir · Nonfiction · Updated June 2026
The Vegetarian
Yeong-hye, a quiet and unremarkable woman in Seoul, stops eating meat after a disturbing dream. Her decision — modest, private, hers — sets off a chain of violence from the people around her who cannot tolerate it. Told in three parts, each from a different perspective, The Vegetarian is a novel about what happens to a woman who simply refuses. It won the International Booker Prize in 2016 and introduced Han Kang to the world. She went on to win the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2024.
Han Kang writes about the body as a site of resistance in a way no other writer does. The Vegetarian is short and devastating — you can read it in an afternoon and spend weeks thinking about it. The best place to start with her work.
We Do Not Part
Han Kang’s most recent novel, published the year after her Nobel Prize, is set against the Jeju April Third Incident — a massacre that killed tens of thousands of people on the South Korean island of Jeju between 1948 and 1954, suppressed from public discourse for decades. A novelist travels to Jeju in a blizzard to care for her friend’s bird. What she finds there is not what she expected. We Do Not Part is Han Kang at her most tender and her most politically committed.
Han Kang makes the historical intimate without diminishing either. This is the book to read if you want to understand why she won the Nobel — the committee cited her ability to “confront historical traumas and the fragility of human life.”
Butter
A journalist begins visiting Manako Kajii — a woman convicted of murdering multiple men who were obsessed with her cooking — in prison. Kajii refuses to be understood, refuses to be reduced, and insists on feeding everyone who comes near her. Butter is a novel about female appetite in every sense: hunger for food, for power, for a life not organised around other people’s comfort. One of the most discussed literary novels of its year, and the book that introduced Asako Yuzuki to readers outside Japan.
Butter does something rare: it makes you genuinely unsettled by a character you also find completely magnetic. The food writing alone is worth the price of admission.
Hooked
Asako Yuzuki’s follow-up to Butter is quieter, more interior, and in some ways more unsettling. Where Butter explored appetite as confrontation, Hooked turns inward — to obsession, loneliness, and the specific quality of connection that forms between people who cannot quite reach each other. Yuzuki continues her examination of women who exist outside the frameworks available to them, and the cost of that existence.
If Butter introduced you to Yuzuki, Hooked will keep you. The two books are in conversation — you don’t need to read them in order, but reading Butter first makes Hooked land harder.
Heart Lamp
Banu Mushtaq’s Heart Lamp won the International Booker Prize 2025 — the first time the prize went to a work written in Kannada, a language spoken by approximately 40 million people in southern India. The stories follow Muslim women in Karnataka navigating the competing demands of family, faith, and desire with a warmth and moral seriousness that never tips into sentimentality. Mushtaq, who is in her seventies, has been publishing in Kannada for decades; this is her first appearance in English, translated by Deepa Bhasthi.
Heart Lamp is the kind of book that reminds you how much gets lost in translation pipelines — and how much, in this case, has been found. These are stories about ordinary life that feel extraordinary.
I Am Malala
Malala Yousafzai grew up in the Swat Valley in Pakistan, the daughter of an educator who ran a school for girls. When the Taliban took control and banned girls from attending school, Malala began speaking out — first anonymously, then publicly. In 2012, at fifteen, she was shot in the head by a Taliban gunman on her school bus. She survived, and I Am Malala is the memoir she wrote in the year after: about her childhood, her father, the valley she grew up in, and the belief that education is worth dying for. She became the youngest-ever Nobel Peace Prize laureate in 2014.
This book is on my shelf because it is one of the clearest accounts I know of what it costs to insist on being educated — and because Malala writes about her father with a love and specificity that makes the whole book alive.
→ Read my full thoughts on I Am Malala
→ All books by Malala Yousafzai
Convenience Store Woman
Keiko Furukura is thirty-six and has worked in the same convenience store for eighteen years. She is not unhappy. The people around her — her family, her colleagues — are. Sayaka Murata’s novel is one of the sharpest satires of social conformity in recent Japanese fiction: a portrait of a woman who has genuinely found what she needs in a world that cannot accept that. Short, funny, disturbing in ways that accumulate quietly.
This is the book I recommend most often when someone wants to understand contemporary Japanese fiction without knowing where to start. Murata does in 160 pages what many novels cannot do in 400.
Pachinko
Four generations of a Korean family in Japan, from 1910 to 1989. Pachinko begins with a forbidden pregnancy in a small Korean fishing village and follows its consequences across a century — through colonial occupation, war, migration, and the specific discrimination that ethnic Koreans face in Japan. Min Jin Lee spent thirty years researching this novel, and the scope of that research is visible on every page. It was a finalist for the National Book Award and remains one of the most ambitious multigenerational sagas in contemporary fiction.
Pachinko changes your understanding of a history you thought you knew. I think about the opening line — “History has failed us, but no matter” — more often than almost any other sentence I have read.
The Woman Warrior
Part memoir, part mythology, part feminist manifesto. Maxine Hong Kingston weaves together her own childhood in California’s Chinese immigrant community with the stories her mother told her — of women warriors, silent aunts, and the ghosts of a China she never saw. The Woman Warrior won the National Book Critics Circle Award for nonfiction in 1976 and is now considered one of the defining texts of Asian-American literature. Difficult to categorise and impossible to forget.
This is the book that made a literary tradition possible. If you want to understand where contemporary Asian-American writing comes from — Ocean Vuong, Jenny Zhang, R.F. Kuang — Kingston is the source.
Yellowface
June Hayward steals a manuscript from her dead colleague Athena Liu — a wildly successful Chinese-American author — and publishes it under a slightly adjusted name. What happens next is a razor-sharp satire of publishing, race, social media, and the specific dynamics of whose stories get told and who profits from them. Yellowface was shortlisted for the Women’s Prize and was one of the most discussed novels of 2023. R.F. Kuang wrote it in part from personal experience of navigating the publishing industry as a woman of colour.
Yellowface is the book that makes everyone uncomfortable in a different way — which is exactly what the best satire does. Sharp, compulsive, and impossible to dismiss.
Not sure where to start?
If you have read nothing on this list
→ Start with Convenience Store Woman. It takes two hours and you will not stop thinking about it. Then read The Vegetarian. Then Butter. At that point you will have your own opinion about what to read next.
If you want the book with the longest reach
→ Pachinko. Four generations, one century, the history of a people most Western readers know almost nothing about.
If you want nonfiction
→ I Am Malala is on my bookshelf for a reason. One of the essential memoirs of the past twenty years.
Frequently asked questions about books by Asian authors
Who are the best Asian authors writing today?
The writers whose new work I follow most closely are Han Kang (South Korea, Nobel Prize 2024), Asako Yuzuki (Japan), and R.F. Kuang (Chinese-American). Han Kang is the most significant literary voice to emerge from Asia in this generation — The Vegetarian, Human Acts, The White Book, and We Do Not Part are each essential. Yuzuki has established herself as one of the most interesting writers on female psychology and appetite working anywhere. Banu Mushtaq, whose Heart Lamp won the International Booker in 2025, is a new addition to the list of writers worth watching.
What Han Kang book should I read first?
Start with The Vegetarian — it is the shortest and most direct entry into her work, and it won the International Booker Prize in 2016. If you want something longer and more historically grounded, Human Acts is her most overtly political novel, about the 1980 Gwangju Uprising in South Korea. We Do Not Part (2025) is her most recent and deals with the Jeju massacre of 1948–1954. Her Nobel Prize citation praised her ability to “confront historical traumas and the fragility of human life,” and all three novels demonstrate exactly that.
Is Pachinko worth reading?
Yes, and it is worth the length. Pachinko is 480 pages and earns every one of them. Min Jin Lee spent thirty years researching the experience of ethnic Koreans in Japan — a community that has faced systematic discrimination for over a century and whose story is almost invisible in Western literary fiction. The novel follows four generations across eighty years and gives each character their own interiority and logic. It is one of the finest multigenerational novels written in English in the past decade.
What are the best books by Japanese authors?
From this list: Butter and Hooked by Asako Yuzuki, and Convenience Store Woman by Sayaka Murata. Beyond this list, the Japanese authors worth prioritising are Haruki Murakami (Norwegian Wood is the most accessible entry point), Banana Yoshimoto (Kitchen), and Yoko Ogawa (The Memory Police). Contemporary Japanese fiction is one of the most consistently interesting literary traditions in the world right now, and Yuzuki and Murata are doing the most urgent work in it.
What are the best books by Asian women authors?
The books on this list written by women: The Vegetarian and We Do Not Part by Han Kang, Butter and Hooked by Asako Yuzuki, Heart Lamp by Banu Mushtaq, I Am Malala by Malala Yousafzai, Convenience Store Woman by Sayaka Murata, Pachinko by Min Jin Lee, The Woman Warrior by Maxine Hong Kingston, and Yellowface by R.F. Kuang. Collectively these books span South Korea, Japan, India, Pakistan, China, and the Asian diaspora in the United States. The Woman Warrior is the foundational text of Asian-American women’s writing and worth reading even if you read nothing else on this list.
From the bookshelf
“The world is so big, so complicated, so replete with marvels and surprises that it takes years for most people to begin to notice that it is, also, irretrievably broken.” — Michael Chabon
If this list resonated with you, you’ll find more books like these on my personal bookshelf — hand-picked for readers who want books that stay with them long after the last page.
