East and South East Asian (ESEA) Heritage Month is an annual celebration in the UK that takes place every September. It was set up in 2020 by the grassroots organisation besea.n. The diversity within the collective of ESEA heritage is enormous, and there are countless stories to be heard that the literary world is only beginning to tap into. To celebrate the month, we asked Zoe Li, Founder of ESEA Bookshop Juniper by the Sea, for her top five fiction writers to watch.
Ela Lee
In Ela Lee’s powerful debut Jaded, Ceyda (known to everyone as Jade, her Starbucks name) is a Korean-Turkish woman in London. She’s a corporate lawyer who wakes up one morning after a work event with no idea how she got home. The novel explores sexual assault and consent at its core, but it deftly weaves around multiple other pressure points - of multicultural heritage, class, and diversity tokenism. It’s a quiet novel that packs a punch, and I’m eagerly awaiting her next book already, a multi-generational story set across UK and Korea.
Susan Barker
Susan Barker’s last novel, The Incarnations, was a breathtaking masterpiece that was as mesmerising as it was gruesome. Her new book Old Soul is out in February 2025, and she shows us again why she is a master of writing narratives that haunt the reader long after the last page. When two grieving strangers meet by chance in Osaka airport, they discover a disturbing connection between the deaths of their loved ones. What follows is a trail that weaves across continents and centuries to find the mysterious woman that appeared in the days leading up to their deaths. Thanks to an advanced reader copy, I can attest that this upcoming literary horror is bound to crawl under your skin.
Daphne Palasi Andreades
Her debut novel Brown Girls is a dizzying, lyrical ode to girlhood. Written in first-person plural throughout, ‘we’ are a group of young women of colour, daughters of immigrants growing up in Queens, New York. The chorus of voices is astonishing, immersing us in sisterhood to experience a collective coming of age filled with exuberance and bittersweet tenderness. Although Palasi Andreades wrote this novel contextualised in racism and marginalisation in contemporary America, it’s a narrative of both joy and heartache that will feel all too familiar to women of colour around the world.
K-Ming Chang
Gods of Want is an utterly bewitching and surreal collection of short stories. The characters are unapologetically queer Asian American women, their desires and rage slip between myth and horror from one word to the next. Like the most electrifying kind of poetry, K-Ming Chang’s writing serves up startling combinations of texture and imagery that leaves us spellbound.
Eliza Chan
Fathomfolk is a captivating fantasy novel where pollution and political exploitation have driven out seafolk from their havens, forcing them to co-exist with humans in a semi-flooded cityscape. This waterweaving fantasy is a brilliant allegory of our own world, with the food and city setting reminiscent of metropolises like Singapore. Fans of Fathomfolk don’t have to wait much longer as the sequel, Tideborn, is out in March 2025, and I’m excited to hear that Eliza Chan has promised us more historical fantasy novels in the pipeline after this duology - monster hunting and hopping vampires in colonial Hong Kong anyone?
About Zoe Li
Zoe Li is the founder of Juniper by the Sea Bookshop. It’s the first bookshop in the UK focused on celebrating writers, poets and playwrights of East and South East Asian heritage, particularly those in the diaspora. The bookshop is centred around community building, and its mission is to build a readership for these great books, prevent some of the lesser known titles from going out of print, and advocate for greater representation not just in literature but in the wider arts sector. The bookshop is primarily based online, but it hosts numerous in-person events too. You can find the bookshop at www.juniperbythesea.com or follow on Instagram.
To found out more about East and South East Asian Heritage Month in the UK, visit the bsea.n website.
