Unheard voices in literature: our picks

In a novel spanning decades and generations, Brit Bennett’s best seller The Vanishing Half describes twin African American sisters who take divergent paths in the early 1970s, one passing as a White woman, the other returning to live in her small southern community. An exciting, fast paced read, the book also asks deep questions about colorism and the meaning of success in American culture....

Transcendent Kingdom follows a young scientist, Gifty, the child of immigrants from Ghana. A novel about love, grief and faith, it details Gifty’s search for meaning through the lenses of both scientific study, and her more ambiguous childhood religious tradition.

Mira Jacob’s memoir is uniquely oriented through various conversations over the course of her life.  Jacobs, a child of Indian immigrants who lived through post 9/11 New York with her mixed-race son, shares her perspective on race and ethnicity illustrated by her humorous, honest and difficult storytelling.

In Luster, a millennial woman of color in contemporary New York City wrestles with dead-end jobs, drugs and alcohol and a strange relationship with a married white man whose suburban life she envies. She develops a relationship with her lover’s wife and adopted Black daughter and tries to rediscover herself as an artist....

Set on an Ojibwe reservation in North Dakota, Love Medicine follows the deeply intertwined lives of two families: the Kashpaws and the Lamartines. The novel’s themes of enduring love and familial virtue contrast starkly with ever-growing injustice and betrayal against native communities. Erdrich artfully blends tightly woven narratives and moments of heartbreak in this 1984 classic. ...

Through letters between Little Dog, a Vietnamese American man, and his illiterate mother, Ocean Vuong tells a multigenerational story that grapples with themes of race, sexuality and gender. On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous is an epistolary novel, memoir, and series of poems all in one, reaffirming the importance of storytelling and language....

Structured like a screenplay, Interior Chinatown follows actor Willis Wu struggling to break free from the stereotypical and one-sided Asian narrative on-screen. The book exposes the myth of the model minority, as well as the lack of holistic representation of Asian people in popular culture....

Atlantic journalist Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote Between the World and Me, winner of the 2015 National Book Award for Nonfiction, to describe the systemic and individual ways racial violence is perpetuated in American culture and institutions. The book is written as a letter to his teenage son, detailing the suffering and perseverance of the Black experience....

A series of thought-provoking short stories that delve into themes of identity, race, and culture culminate in a final novella titled The Office of Historical Corrections. Daniel Evans’ insight into human behavior and relationships move the reader to reckon with the realities of American history....