Asian Heritage Month Book List

In honour of Asian Heritage Month, Read Alberta has compiled a selection of Alberta-published books that centre Asian voices, perspectives, and stories.

YOU STILL LOOK THE SAME
By Farzana Doctor

This debut poetry collection from acclaimed novelist Farzana Doctor is both an intimate deep dive and a humorous glance at the tumultuous decade of her forties. Through crisp and vivid language, Doctor explores mid-life breakups and dating, female genital cutting, imprints of racism and misogyny, and the oddness of sex and love, and urges us to take a second look at the ways in which human relationships are never what we expect them to be.

You Still Look the Same

Farzana Doctor

Published: May 01, 2022 by Freehand Books
ISBN: 9781990601057

EYEPIECE
By Vic Sarin

In Eyepiece: Adventures in Canadian Television and Film, brilliant Kashmiri and Canadian cinematographer and filmmaker Vic Sarin lays out the landscape of his life. As cinematographer, he captured the filmic beauty of many well-loved Canadian films and also directed his own award-winning work. This book charts his formative years at CBC television and progresses through his extraordinary film and documentary productions.

Eyepiece: Adventures in Canadian Film and Television

Vic Sarin

Published: Nov 01, 2017 by Durvile Publications
ISBN: 9781988824024

HOW TO HOLD A PEBBLE
By Jaspreet Singh

How to Hold a Pebble—Jaspreet Singh’s second collection of poems—locates humans in the Anthropocene, while also warning against the danger of a single story. These pages present intimate engagements with memory, place, language, migration; with enchantment, uncanniness, uneven climate change and everyday decolonization; with entangled human/non-human relationships and deep anxieties about essential/non-essential economic activities.

Sorry, we don’t have that EAN, yet

HOW THE CHINESE CREATED CANADA
By Adrian Ma

Chinese culture has permeated the fabric of Canadian society with bold, exciting cuisine, art, music and alternative approaches to medicine and healing. Talented and creative individuals have made these concepts an integral aspect of everyday Canadian culture. How the Chinese Created Canada provides an in-depth look at the triumphs and struggles of one of Canada’s most vibrant communities.

How the Chinese Created Canada

Adrian Ma

Published: Jun 16, 2010 by Dragon Hill Publishing
ISBN: 9781896124193

DUTY, HONOUR & IZZAT
By Steven Purewal; illustrated by Christopher Rawlins

Presented as a historical scrapbook with beautifully realised, photo-realistic artwork, Duty, Honour & Izzat is a graphic novel story about a teenage boy, in Surrey BC, caught up in drug gangs. He rethinks his choices after his 95 year old great grandfather comes to visit the family in Canada. His stories of their past, and seeing him reunited with a Canadian soldier his great grandfather saved during WW2, opens up a different path to live his life. Going beyond the old tropes of colonized histories, Duty, Honour & Izzat presents the Indo-Canadian community’s pioneer experience within the events leading to the ejection of the Komagata Maru from Canadian waters in July 1914 and the subsequent outbreak of the Great War in August 1914.

Duty, Honour & Izzat

Steven Purewal

Published: Dec 15, 2018 by Renegade Arts Entertainment
ISBN: 9781988903477

IN FLUX
By Roy Miki

In this collection of essays edited by the University of Guelph’s Smaro Kamboureli, Roy Miki—poet, scholar, and member of the Order of Canada—investigates the shifting currents of citizenship, globalization, and cultural practices facing Asian Canadians today through the connections of place and identity that have been forged through our developing national literature.

In Flux: Transnational Shifts in Asian Canadian Writing

Roy Miki

Published: Oct 15, 2011 by NeWest Press
ISBN: 9781897126936

ALL OF US IN OUR OWN LIVES
By Manjushree Thapa

In All of Us in Our Own Lives, Ava Berriden quits her corporate job in Toronto to move to Nepal, from where she was adopted as a baby. There she struggles to adapt to her new career in international aid and forge a connection with the country of her birth. Ava’s work brings her into contact with Indira Sharma, who has ambitions of becoming the first Nepali woman director of a NGO; Sapana Karki, a bright young teenager living a small village; and Gyanu, Sapana’s brother, who has returned home from Dubai to settle his sister’s future after their father’s death. Their journeys collide in unexpected ways.

All of Us in Our Own Lives

Asian Heritage Month Book List