9 Books with South Asian Characters to Read in 2018

In 2009, the Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie gave a viral TED talk, "The Danger of a Single Story." It was about what happens when complex human beings and cultures are reduced to a single narrative: when South Asians immigrants, for example, are only seen as upwardly mobile and politically docile.

When I was a young person, books about the South Asian American experience (there were very few!) often centered on these sorts of immigrants and cultural conflicts between "Old World" values and "New World" expectations or individual negotiations between brownness and whiteness. These were important stories, and very meaningful to me as a South Asian American girl. But years later, I’m overjoyed to see so many books about South Asian teens by South Asian writers that go beyond that single story.

2018 brings a slew of books about the South Asian experience that I only wish I'd had as a younger person, with characters and situations rarely portrayed in literature of the diaspora. They feature a working-class Indian American protagonist in “From Twinkle, With Love” by Sandhya Menon and a U.S.-born Muslim American single mother in Mariam Sharma Hits the Road by Sheba Karim. They are set among the close-knit South Asian expatriate community in Saudi Arabia in A Girl Like That by Tanaz Bhathena and in a multi-dimensional world inhabited by characters from Bengali folktales in The Serpent's Secret by Sayantani DasGupta. They are contemporary romances in which neither of the lovelorn are white (“My So-Called Bollywood Life” by Nisha Sharma) and historical fiction novels which portray periods of South Asian history which are rarely studied in American classrooms (“The Night Diary” by Veera Hiranandani). These are diverse #ownvoices that you really need to read!