67 Books by Women of Color to Read in 2026

It is now officially the year of the horse, specifically the fire horse, which makes way for new beginnings, newfound energy for change, and a death of old patterns that no longer serve. Take a deep breath and welcome this newness after the reckoning that was 2025, the year of the snake. The year of the snake symbolizes a shedding of old versions of self, a deepening intuition that comes from intentional introspection, and a rebirth. But a rebirth is painful and starting the world fresh again means leading with softness and vulnerability, which is also difficult. The world can feel harsh on fresh and tender skin. I felt as if 2025 was the end of a series of reckoning years, in which confrontation of the self was inevitable to build a desired life. This kind of work is lonely; the internal questioning of self and processing of the past is loaded with grief and darkness. Now, there is disorientation navigating this newness of self while acclimating to this increasingly chaotic world. Throughout all of this, I also feel the immense importance of finding new ways to mother myself through this winding path and grapple with what motherhood means.

I have the wonderful job of looking through all the new literature in winter and spring of 2026 to highlight those written by women of color. I have deep gratitude and respect for R.O. Kwon who handed me the torch after being the arbiter of this list for years. When I first opened Yu & Me Books in 2021, the goal was always to fill shelves with stories written by writers of color, especially immigrant stories. Storytelling is sharing the aliveness in our complex perspectives and breathing life into the nuances of existence. Sharing stories is also the constant fight for visibility under systems of oppression. For me, it is vital to pay attention to the richness and range within these narratives. To witness the breadth and continuous growth of literature created by women of color gives me much needed hope. As I look through these incredible works coming out this year, I feel deeply inspired and revived. I remember why I created Yu & Me Books and am reminded of the necessity of carrying on.

Through diving into of these upcoming books, I felt my shoulders relax as I begin to feel far less alone. In these upcoming literary works, I notice major similarities in themes of rest, retreat, confrontation, grief, motherhood, and release. The cohesion of our inherent connectivity becomes clear. Reckoning returns in many of these books, fueling plots and characters to unflinchingly confront their pasts so that they can burn a new path forward. I am excited to delve into these worlds where women are willing to ask the existential questions and do the painful work of standing still instead of running from. This kind of work requires fighting against expectations, societal standards, and misogyny, all while living with ghosts of before. These books are subversive in so many forms. Between the surreal and very real, these women writers show the braveness required in vulnerability and the power necessary for revival. They show the beauty of slowing down to trust one’s intuition. These writers remind us that rest is required in resistance and resilience, and while the dark storms of living will continue, our endurance is rejuvenated by being close to those we love, which includes the self. I am so excited for you all to read these incredible books and to continue this reflective journey together.

January

Birthstones in the Province of Mercy: Poems by Bo Hee Moon

From the perspective of a South Korean adoptee, Bo Hee Moon explores the blurriness of memory and the longing for a home when the definition of home remains unclear. Matthew Zapruder, author of I Love Hearing Your Dreams, says “each poem is a whole world, magically conjured from the American vernacular, often enriched by Korean hangul. This is the hopeful, sad, elegiac, and important work of an original poet of great talent and truth.”

The Moon Without Stars by Chanel Miller

I love Chanel Miller as a writer and am always interested in her wide range of artistic abilities. I am such a big fan of her other middle grade novel, Magnolia Wu Unfolds It All, because of the depth, earnestness, and reality of the complexity of being that age. Reading her middle grade books deeply heal the inner child within me by seeing the breadth of all we hold as children and how that parallels all we hold as adults. The Moon Without Stars follows Luna in seventh grade who loves writing and making zines with her bff, Scott. But when one of their zines takes off and Luna is thrust into popularity, she must grapple with compromising who she is to be well liked while navigating understanding who she is. Deeply personal, funny, and vulnerable.

The Old Fire by Elisa Shua Dusapin, translated by Aneesa Abbas Higgins

For those who want a book to inhale in one sitting, Elisa Shua Dusapin is a master at that. For lovers of Katie Kitamura, Elena Ferrante, and Joachim Trier, The Old Fire follows Agathe who leaves New York to return to her home in the French countryside fifteen years after she left. A haunting, tender, and tense tale told anachronistically through the various versions of self, home, and family.

Sheer by Vanessa Lawrence

Vanessa Lawrence’s second novel, Sheer takes place over just nine days where Maxine Thomas, the founder of a cult makeup company, is suspended by her own board for a scandal. An investigation to the female gaze, queerness, shifting beauty standards, and the shaky line between empowerment and abuse of power.

Discipline by Larissa Pham

Larissa Pham’s debut novel following her collection of essays, Pop Song, explores a woman forced to confront unsettling truths about herself, her past, her present, and her future as she recovers from a destructive affair with her former mentor. The New York Times writes that “while Discipline sounds like a thriller, Pham makes room for terse reflections on ambition, envy, creative exhaustion and the paintings of Vija Celmins.”

A Beast Slinks Towards Beijing by Alice Evelyn Yang

A debut novel full of magical realism that doesn’t shy from the darkness that comes from digging into family history. With folklore and atmospheric prose, Yang brings the reader through the long tail of intergenerational trauma and legacy of colonialism. The narrative moves through the Japanese occupation of Manchuria and the Cultural Revolution to unravel the tight intertwinement of fate, family, and forgiveness. 

The Hour of the Wolf: A Memoir by Fatima Bhutto

A kaleidoscopic memoir of finding oneself after the harsh aftermath of a manipulative relationship while still navigating the long tail of grief after the death of Fatima’s father. She is accompanied during the pandemic by her dog, Coco, as she begins to question everything about her life. Fatima is forced to confront the messy and harsh pains of her own experience. A heartbreaking and hopeful read to navigate loss, questioning motherhood, resilience, healing, and a desire for family through art, literature, cinema, nature, and friendship.

On Sundays She Picked Flowers by Yah Yah Scholfield

For fans of Victor LaValle and River Solomon, Yah Yah Scholfield writes a sinister and surreal Southern Gothic about Jude, a woman who escapes her abusive childhood home to the forests of Northern Georgia without a plan or destination. Jude soon finds shelter in an eccentric and dilapidated home haunted by a violent history that mirrors the horrors of her own.

Missing Sam by Thrity Umrigar

A thriller following a woman who goes missing on a morning run and her wife’s determination to both find her and clear her own name while navigating the societal dangers of being brown and queer in America. The Washington Post describes it as “both propulsive and provocative, as the initial focus on Sam’s disappearance broadens to consider the far-reaching effects of prejudice and pressures to conform.”

The Seven Daughters of Dupree by Nikesha Elise Williams

For lovers of Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi, The Seven Daughters of Dupree follows fourteen-year-old Tati who uncovers a legacy of family secrets, leading her on a search for answers through seven generations of Dupree women. In this multi-generational epic, Williams writes with power about the legacy of generational resilience and the complexity of unbreakable family bonds.

I Identify as Blind: A Brazen Celebration of Disability Culture, Identity, and Power by Lachi, with Tim Vandehey

In our increasingly ableist society, it’s more important than ever to be advocating for an inclusive world prioritizing innovation created for people with disabilities. When society values disabled people as the leaders, role models, and key innovators they truly are, everybody benefits. Lachi writes with humor and inspiration to shed more light on all the wisdom inherent in the disability experience.

February

Language as Liberation: Reflections on the American Canon by Toni Morrison

Toni Morrison cracks open the American conception of race through the investigation of Black characters in the American literary canon. Morrison examines the white writers who created fictional Black characters and draws parallels to the commodification of Black bodies that built this country while examining the role of fiction in American racial identity. With energetic wit, Language as Liberation interrogates the seeds of language in America’s most famous works and its long-term effects on the skewed perspective of this nation’s subconscious. This work shows the brilliant teacher that Morrison is and redefines our literary landscape as we know it.

black frag/ments: Poems by Lolita Stewart-White

Poems both tender and burning hold the fragmentation of blackness, family, and community while navigating the necessity of pulsing love in the face of grief. Read if you’re looking for language to navigate the tumultuous frequencies of everyday life. Terrance Hayes calls it “a vision of recovery, witness and love.”

The World After Rain: Anne’s Poem by Canisia Lubrin

Canisia Lubrin brings us on a journey through this long-form poetic tribute to her mother. Dreaminess and pain in the ambiguity that grief are the foundation of Lubrin’s decisive and lyrical prose meditating on love, time, and loss through the tumult of living. Booklist writes how “the poet renders time atmospheric, with interiors and exteriors, personal and political, overlapping as Lubrin observes ‘how we are astonished.’”

Simple Heart by Cho Haejin, translated by Jamie Chang

Nana is a Korean playwright who was adopted as a child by a French couple. A Korean filmmaker wishes to make a documentary about her life, and she heads to Seoul where her memory unravels as she learns about her past. For fans of movies Return to Seoul and Past Lives, as well as Kyung-Sook Shin’s Please Look After Mom.

Superfan by Jenny Tinghui Zhang

Jenny Tinghui Zhang first novel, Four Treasures of the Sky, still sticks with me. Her writing brings you into the complex characters and worlds she creates and I’m thrilled about her sophomore novel, Superfan, where she explores the horrors and magic of fandom during a shared time of loneliness.

Every Happiness by Reena Shah

For those who love complex and lifelong female friendships despite classism and family. Elizabeth McCracken says “I don’t think I have ever missed a set of novel characters more: astonishingly alive, lovable, aggravating, real. Shah writes beautifully about every sort of love: filial, parental, marital, and above all the longing and vivid pettiness and durable, complicated love between women over decades.”

Autobiography of Cotton by Cristina Rivera Garza, translated from the Spanish by Christina MacSweeney

Weaving archival research and personal narrative, Rivera Garza examines the borderlands of cotton cultivation and cycles of generational deprivation through the brittle land between Mexico and the U.S. She writes of her grandparents’ journey to these cotton fields and expertly expands from the deeply personal to the larger context of ecocide, colonization, labor activism, and migration.

With the Heart of a Ghost: Stories by Lim Sunwoo, translated by Chi-Young Kim

A debut collection of eight stories that look unflinchingly into the complexity of exploring strange possibilities and desires in life and death. Written with humor and empathy for all the unseen and unexplored feelings that arise between this world and others. Full of love, whimsy, grief, and openness.

Love Story by Afsana Mousavi

A dreamy debut that follows a young transsexual’s feverish passage through her initiation into New York City’s underground nightlife as she attempts to reconcile its predatory yet deeply salvational euphorias. Afsana delves into the blurring lines between transition and cultural capital and the currency of femininity.

Dark Laboratory: On Columbus, the Caribbean, and the Origins of the Climate Crisis by Tao Leigh Goffe

Through the lens of the Caribbean and braiding together family history, cultural reportage, and social studies, Goffe radically transforms how we conceive Blackness, the natural world, colonialism, and the climate crisis. Dark Laboratory forces a reckoning with received forms of knowledge that have led us astray and dismantles the many layers of entrenched imperialist thinking that shroud our established understanding of the human and environmental conditions to reveal the cause and effect of a global catastrophe. 

The Midnight Taxi by Yosha Gunasekera

In this debut mystery novel, a Sri Lankan American taxi driver in New York City discovers one of her passengers murdered in the backseat. Siriwathi, the protagonist, becomes the primary and obvious suspect of the murder. She only has five days to chase through New York to find out who really killed the midnight passenger, or her own life will be over. Yosha Gunasekera is also an attorney at the Innocence Project fighting for the wrongfully convicted and I cannot wait to read her book.

Everyday Movement by Gigi L. Leung, translated by Jennifer Feeley

This powerful novel follows the lives of two women through the crumbling of democracy in Hong Kong. Both have been chased and tear-gassed in the streets of their city after joining tens of thousands of others to protest a national security law that would effectively end democracy. Leung’s writing shows the existential dichotomy of everyday living against the backdrop of a shattering reality.

Bad Asians by Lillian Li

From the writer of Number One Chinese Restaurant, Lillian Li writes about a group of friends grappling with the challenges of perception, stereotyping, and the American dream while growing up Asian American during the rise of the internet. Kirkus Reviews writes that “the novel beautifully explores Asian American identity; economic instability; relationships as both anchor and buoy; the malleability of success; and the ways that ambition manifests itself for better or worse.”

On Morrison by Namwali Serpell

Namwali Serpell uses her unique experience as both a writer and professor teaching a course on Toni Morrison to give breadth to her wide range of complex, masterful, and innovative experiments with literary form. With close readings and contextual guidance, On Morrison brings the reader on new journeys through her famous fiction and her lesser-known plays and poetry. Serpell will make you want to read literature with fresh eyes and rediscover a love for reading.

Daughter of Mother-of-Pearl by Mandy-Suzanne Wong

For lovers of Sabrina Imbler’s How Far the Light Reaches and Lulu Miller’s Why Fish Don’t Exist, jump into this collection of essays radically reimagining the ideal of “the self” through coexistence with other species. She teaches us to cherish the many other life forms while knowing we will never fully understand them.

Cleopatra by Saara El-Arifi

In a subversive, evocative, and sensuous historical epic, Cleopatra tells her own story. Saara El-Arifi builds a deeply lush world that pulls you in with her prose. R.F. Kuang describes the book as “enchanting, smart, and subversive” and Kat Dunn calls it “vividly realized and skillfully unraveled . . . as insightful as it is engrossing.”

Maybe the Body: Poems by Asa Drake

A beautiful debut poetry collection that dives into the conflicts between art and patriotism, labor and longing. With rich imagery and deeply expressive prose, Asa Drake traces multi-generational lineage shaped by economic, ecological, and political dissonance through the Philippines and the American South.

Kin by Tayari Jones

I love the way Tayari Jones writes and am a huge fan of An American Marriage. Kin is full of wit and emotion following two lifelong friends whose worlds converse after many years apart in the face of devastating tragedy. Ann Patchett calls Kin “the kind of all-encompassing reading experience I’m always hoping to find: smart and funny and deftly profound.”

March

Let the Poets Govern: A Declaration of Freedom by Camonghne Felix

Throughout Camonghne Felix’s experience at the center of American politics, she has maintained her unwavering belief in language’s foundational revolutionary potential, outside of its deployment for legislative and political ends. In this groundbreaking work of nonfiction, she argues that Black radical poetic traditions model an ethical code and overcome engrained patriarchal and reductive structures.

The Valley of Vengeful Ghosts by Kim Fu

Kim Fu writes an eerie psychological horror about Eleanor, reckoning with the decisions she’s made in her life as grief haunts her into blurring the real and imagined. Eleanor lives in the aftermath of her mother’s death and tries to grapple with her own life under the ghost of her mother’s expectations.

Whidbey by T Kira Madden

T Kira Madden blew me away with her stunning memoir, Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls, and I’m so excited to read her debut novel. Whidbey is an explosive and perceptive thriller that follows three women connected through one man in the aftermath of his murder. In page turning pace, Madden follows the intertwinement of these women to raise questions about the pursuit of justice and the power of the storyteller.

Songs for Darkness by Iman Humaydan Yunis

The voices of four generations of women from one family in Mount Lebanon echo a scarred history starting from the eve of the WWI to the 1982 Lebanon War. Iman Humaydan Yunis honors the lives of these women through songs that are the heartbeat of the required tenacity, generosity, and sacrifice necessary in dark times.

Strange Girls by Sarvat Hasin

Sarvat Hasin makes her US debut with a novel about navigating the nuances of a fraught friendship that has lasted for years. Traveling between the past and present, Hasin shows how deeply friends influence each other, propel each other’s art, and break each other’s hearts. Kiran Millwood Hargrave calls it “Simply sublime—about that feverish, feral first finding of true friendship that becomes all-encompassing and reforms who you are.”

Light and Thread by Han Kang, translated by Maya West, e. yaewon and Paige Aniyah Morris

The power of Han Kang as a writer is her ability to peer into the hazy grays of existence and build new bridges between internal and external worlds. She sees daily living with a distinctly sharp and perceptive eye such that the reader has no choice but to breath expansively and recognize the additional space available in life. For lovers of The White Book, Han Kang once again masters a cross-genre work full of poems, essays, photographs, diary entries, and reflections in Light and Thread. Through the thread of language, Han Kang’s newly translated work will shorten the distance between the writer and reader and force the heart to beat with aliveness.

On the Prairies We Will Live Forever: Poems by Erica Violet Lee

Erica Violet Lee’s exquisite debut poetry collection explores community love as a pathway towards freedom. She imagines thriving lives for Native girls where there is abundance in the inner-city, which is and has always been home on Native Land. David Chariandy describes On the Prairies We Will Live Forever as “a book of urgent aliveness, a love letter to the author’s most intimate relations and a beacon for all who yearn for a liveable future.”

Python’s Kiss by Louise Erdrich

Louise Erdrich dives into the wisdom and sorrow inherent in the extremes of existence itself in this short story collection written over two decades. Her range of characters speak to her unparalleled imagination. This collection is done in creative collaboration with visual artwork by her daughter, Aza Erdrich Abe.

Seasons of Glass and Iron: Stories by Amal El-Mohtar

In Amal El-Mohtar’s short story collection, she creates exquisite worlds through folk tales, letters, diary entries with beautiful lyricism. Booklist writes that “El-Mohtar brings genuine storytelling talent paired with lush poetic language to deliver the kind of narratives her devotees have grown to love.”

American Han by Lisa Lee

Lisa Lee’s debut novel challenges the assumptions about the immigrant experience with prose both serious and hilarious. Jane and her brother, Kevin, have “successfully” performed all the requirements to make their family proud. Both are athletically and academically gifted until they become distant from their careers and each other. When Kevin goes missing, their family’s dedication to achieving ideals of the ever-elusive American Dream starts to crack and they are forced to confront the past and present. Their family erupts, undoing of the façade of ideals that may be far from real.

Night Owl: Poems by Aimee Nezhukumatathil

In Aimee Nezhukumatathil’s fifth poetry collection, she explores magic, love, and nature that bloom in the dark hours of the night. She uses the transformative nature of night to shift our perspective on interconnectivity and blurs the borders between us and the surrounding world. Night Owl doesn’t shy away from the noises or silences of the dark and uses them to shine light on the love in revolutionary connection. 

April

Honey in the Wound by Jiyoung Han

Magical realism, mythology, hope, and courage are the heartbeat of this debut novel by Jiyoung Han. Honey in the Wound follows Young-Ja through decades, a girl who infuses food with her emotions. The narrative delves into the lives of a sister who disappears and returns as a tiger, a mother whose voice compels the truth, and a granddaughter who divines secrets in others’ dreams. These women are all of part of one Korean family split across decades and borders by Japanese imperialism.

The Edge of Space-Time: Particles, Poetry, and the Cosmic Dream Boogie by Chanda Prescod-Weinstein

As a science nerd and a lover of poetry, I could not dream up a better combination than this fantastical and existential intersection of physics, Black feminism, queerness, and pop culture. This debut spans space and time and forces us to reckon with what we truly know about the world and ourselves.

My Dear You: Stories by Rachel Khong

At the core of these stories, Rachel Khong writes tales of love in its many forms: being in love, not being in love, yearning to be in love, in the throes of unexpected yet wonderful lifelong friendships, and the intimate intertwining of love and grief. Read if you’re down to be existential.

Inheritance by Jane Park

A debut novel following Anne, a lawyer in New York, who has a “successful” life contingent on the ignorance of her own past. She starts to unravel her family’s past after her father passes away and she returns home to Edmonton to discover he was from North Korea. Anne is transported back to her own childhood and her parents’ lives as she reads the undelivered letters her father wrote to his brother, who was left behind.

Tailbone by Che Yeun

A fierce debut set in Seoul in 2008 following an unnamed teenage girl escaping an abusive home to live in a women’s boarding house during the global financial crisis. T Kira Madden describes it as “a gripping coming of age tale as savage as it is astounding, Tailbone seduces one first with voice, then swells and electrifies from within the storied walls of the Seoul boarding house in which anything is possible. Tailbone introduces Che Yeun as one of the absolute greats, an extraordinary stylist and singular storyteller of our time.”

Nasty Work: Resist Systems, Explore Desire, and Liberate Yourself by Ericka Hart

Ericka Hart believes that sex ed done right can be a tool for liberation. Through Nasty Work, Ericka takes down society’s deeply entrenched colonial views on sex and gender throughout history in this accessible, candid, and revolutionary exploration of how we can—and should—reclaim our minds and bodies for a more pleasurable existence for all.

Cleo Dang Would Rather Be Dead by Mai Nguyen

From the author of Sunshine Nails, Mai Nguyen gives us her second novel with her signature style of honesty, hilarity, and vulnerability. Nguyen uses dark humor to dive into Cleo Dang’s raw emotional turmoil following the loss of her child. She starts to work at a funeral home after self-isolating from grief and must navigate seeing her best friend live out a life of motherhood she desperately wanted for herself.

The Killing Spell by Shay Kauwe

A debut fantasy novel set in the future where language magic reigns. A young Hawaiian woman, Kea Petrova, must solve a murder to save herself, her clan, and her Hawaiian homeland. Magical and mystical, Shay Kauwe is deeply imaginative in this spellbinding debut. 

The Take by Kelly Yang

I am so excited to see Kelly Yang’s first adult fiction novel, especially from someone who is so brilliantly prolific in the children and YA literature realm. The Take is a fast-paced speculative story about two women clinging to their youth and relevancy when their lives intertwine through an age reversal treatment. 

Leave Your Mess at Home by Tolani Akinola

A stunning debut that does not shy away from the messiness of young adulthood and the chaos of discovering who you are. It balances the complexity of navigating a question that haunts most children of immigrants: what do we owe to our families and what do we owe to ourselves?

Don’t Tell Me How It Ends by Adrienne Thurman

For those who find themselves waning on romance and want real, relatable, and layered characters who also prioritize the important and complex love found in deep friendship, sisters, and family in addition to romantic love. Nikki Payne calls it “a sharp, funny, feel-good love story about bad dates, big feelings, and one deliciously slow-burning love that captures the serious mess of modern womanhood and manages to be hilarious at the same time.”

Livonia Chow Mein by Abigail Savitch-Lew

An epic that spans a century, this ambitious debut novel follows a multi-generational restaurant owning family living in Brownsville, Brooklyn. Abigail Savitch-Lew unfolds the richness of Brooklyn and the merging of cultures integral to a New York landscape. This book will challenge our perception of what is required to live in true harmony.

The Language of Liars by S. L. Huang

For lovers of Babel, The Language of Liars is a sci-fi with an engaging world full of linguistics. It poses the question, “What does it mean to understand another species and does that understanding cause destruction?”

The Memory Museum by M Lin

In this sharp and lyrical debut, M Lin takes us from present day to the near future following the complexities of home, memory, culture, and survival in China’s One-Child Generation. She stares deeply into the fogginess of existence between memory and future.

Last Night in Brooklyn by Xochitl Gonzalez

I inhaled Xochitl Gonzalez’s debut, Olga Dies Dreaming, and I’m very eager to read her sophomore novel about a 26-year-old woman who feels smothered by her future while obsessing over her glamorous neighbor. This novel challenges the life that money can buy and the compromises of fiscal assimilation for people of color chasing the “American Dream.”

If We Cannot Go at the Speed of Light by Kim Choyeop, translated by Anton Hur

For lovers of Ted Chiang and speculative sci-fi, If We Cannot Go at the Speed of Light travels far and wide to expand our imaginations of the unfamiliar. Kim Choyeop is unafraid to live in a sharp but ethereal space to look beyond our world to get a closer look at our shared disorienting and relatable humanity. Incredibly inventive and translated by the prolifically talented Anton Hur.

Molka by Monika Kim

Monika Kim is a queen of horror. Molka is an abbreviation of molrae-kamera, a “sneaky camera” hidden to capture covert images and videos for voyeurs. This novel is a provocative delve into voyeurism, female rage, vengeance, and reckoning.

Boring Asian Female by Canwen Xu

For those who love an unraveling woman protagonist (me included, obviously), then get ready for this addictive debut novel. Elizabeth Zhang is used to measuring herself by numbers, statistics, and productivity while also achieving these exceedingly high standards before rejection knocks her down from her expectations. She gets obsessive chasing her vision of success in this subversive and satirical novel.

Dreamt I Found You by Jimin Han

A contemporary retelling of Korea’s Romeo & Juliet. Full of Korean folklore and magic, Dreamt I Found You shows the power of premonition when the cousin of the star-crossed lovers helps them avoid a tragic fate within a rigid class system. 

Questions 27 & 28 by Karen Tei Yamashita

To be considered for release from the West Coast concentration camps, Japanese Americans were required to answer the so-called loyalty questionnaire. Question 27 asked, to those who had been imprisoned without cause by the US military, whether they were willing to serve in combat for the US military. Question 28 asked them—many of whom American citizens who had never visited Japan—to renounce allegiance to the Japanese emperor. Karen Tei Yamashita writes a genre bending novel that chronicles three generations of laborers, artists, scholars, informants, and activists.

May

Honey by Imani Thompson

An adrenaline filled and dark humored novel about Yrsa, who gains a hunger for murder in the name of feminism. Through murdering misogynistic men, she rides a new high that gives her a greater sense of meaning from her PhD research on Afropessimism. The question is how long this rage can sustain her from her own buried family secrets?

The Young Will Remember by Eve J. Chung

Eve J. Chung’s sophomore novel takes place in 1950 and follows 28-year-old Chinese American journalist, Ellie Chang, who is trapped behind enemy lines during the Korean war. This sweeping novel follows her and the women who help her find her way home, not letting us forget about the resilience of love.

One Leg on Earth by ‘Pemi Aguda

In Aguda’s debut novel after her 2024 short story collection, Ghostroots, she uses beautiful prose to portray the haunting changes (both internal and external) of newfound motherhood. Yosoye is the daughter of a distant mother who discovers she is pregnant. She fights for hope of new life while being haunted by strains of being a mother in an unforgiving world. She must also find her own way to navigate the tumultuous landscape of a rapidly changing Lagos.

Coyoteland by Vanessa Hua

Set in El Nido, an affluent Bay Area suburb, Coyoteland follows Jin Chang who hopes his new move into the neighborhood with his family will help him achieve social status and end his string of bad luck. In the wake of a coyote attack during the escalation of fire season, chaos exposes the town hypocrisies and family scandals that will forever change the fate El Nido and its residents. Written with wit, empathy, and heart, Vanessa Hua gives us a rich suburban drama that forces us to untangle the details of our current world.

Distant Water: Poems by Beth Piatote

Beth Piatote is a scholar of Native American literature and focuses on the endangerment of Indigenous languages. In this debut poetry collection, she reminds us the integrated connectivity of our sonic world governed by ancestral knowledge with her inventive and playful prose through the wisdom of the Nez Perce language.

On Witness and Respair: Essays by Jesmyn Ward

I deeply admire the fantastic lyricism of Jesmyn Ward’s writing and am thrilled to read this collection of her essays. She writes with keen wisdom in this collection that starts from her upbringing in a multigenerational household in rural Mississippi and moves through the titular essay telling the story of her partner’s sudden death on the eve of the COVID-19 epidemic. Ward shows the mirrors, windows, and doors of her life that she finds in writers she loves like Octavia Butler, Richard Wright, and Toni Morrison. She reminds us of the healing that comes from writing and shows us hope and beauty in resilience.

Troubled Waters by Ichiyo Higuchi, translated by Bryan Karetnyk

A new translation of five remarkable stories from Japan’s first professional woman writer, Ichiyo Higuchi. Higuchi passed away at 24 in 1896 from tuberculosis and was a major figure in Meiji-era literature shining a light on the lives of Tokyo’s poor and broke a path for women writers.