Because one trip to Singapore’s gilded upper crust was never going to be enough
Let’s get one thing out of the way first: Kevin Kwan’s Crazy Rich Asians was not supposed to be a cultural earthquake. It was published in 2013 by a relatively quiet imprint, without the thunderous marketing campaigns we’ve come to expect from big literary events. And yet it became exactly that a seismic shift in what mainstream American readers expected from commercial fiction.
By the time the 2018 film adaptation hit theaters, the trilogy had sold over 1.5 million copies in a single year, with all three books holding the top three slots on the New York Times paperback fiction bestseller list for twenty, seven, and five weeks respectively. The movie itself was a phenomenon of its own kind: it grossed $239 million worldwide against a production budget of just $30 million, becoming the highest-grossing romantic comedy of the previous ten years. And culturally? It was the first film by a major Hollywood studio to feature a majority cast of Chinese descent in a modern setting since The Joy Luck Club in 1993. Twenty-five years. Let that sink in.
But none of that is why I want to talk to you today. I want to talk to you because you finished Crazy Rich Asians maybe in one sitting, maybe over a frantic weekend and now there’s a hollow feeling where all that Singaporean opulence used to be. You want private jets and scheming mothers-in-law and fashion so expensive it has its own security detail. You want characters who feel like people you genuinely love and love to hate. You want the wit without the condescension, and the glamour without the vacancy.
I’ve spent a good part of my reading life searching for exactly that, and I want to save you some time. Here are twelve books that deserve a place right next to your dog-eared copy of Kwan’s masterwork.
Start Here: The Rest of Kevin Kwan’s World
Before you go anywhere else, you owe it to yourself to finish the trilogy.
China Rich Girlfriend by Kevin Kwan
The second installment in Kwan’s trilogy expands Rachel and Nick’s world considerably, trading Singapore’s established old-money stiffness for the turbo-charged, anything-goes extravagance of Mainland China’s nouveaux riches. This sequel takes us away from Singapore and introduces the filthy rich circles that reside in Mainland China, offering a fascinating look at the cultural differences between Singaporean, Hong Kong, and Mainland Chinese elite circles. It’s a useful reminder that “Asian” is not a monolith, and Kwan skewers every social class with equal, gleeful relish.
Why it works: If the first book was a dinner party where you were the outsider nervously watching everyone else, China Rich Girlfriend is the after-party where all the real drama happens. The sharp Gossip Girl energy gets dialed up significantly, and the satire bites harder.
Rich People Problems by Kevin Kwan
The trilogy’s finale gathers every scheming character Kwan has assembled and locks them inside a Singaporean estate worth a fortune, arguing about who inherits it. The entire Shang-Young clan converges from all corners of the globe to stake claim on their matriarch’s massive fortune, with each family member vying to inherit Tyersall Park a trophy estate on 64 prime acres in the heart of Singapore.
Why it works: It functions as both a satisfying conclusion and a sharp, melancholy meditation on what legacies we choose to pass on. Kwan earns the emotional moments here in ways that surprised me.
The Books That Hit Different
These are the titles I find myself recommending most often, because they satisfy the Crazy Rich Asians craving while offering something the original doesn’t.
Pachinko by Min Jin Lee
This is the most important book on this list, and I’ll fight anyone who disagrees. Where Kwan celebrates spectacle, Lee excavates grief. Pachinko follows four generations of a Korean family living in Japan, beginning with a teenage girl in the 1930s who makes a choice that echoes through every subsequent generation. It is a heart-rending novel of borders, sacrifice, power, and resilience beginning with Sunja, the teenage daughter of a crippled Korean fisherman, and her rejection of her unborn baby’s wealthy, married father.
Why it works: Crazy Rich Asians asks what it costs to be accepted by the rich. Pachinko asks what it costs to simply exist. If you want to understand Asian identity in its full complexity rather than just its most glamorous expression, this is where you go next.
The numbers: Pachinko was a finalist for the National Book Award and has been translated into over thirty languages. The Apple TV+ adaptation became one of the streamer’s most acclaimed series.
The Wangs vs. The World by Jade Chang
This one is the Crazy Rich Asians origin story running in reverse. After amassing a fortune with his cosmetic company, Charles Wang loses everything in the recession. With the one car he has left, Charles picks up two of his children from school and drags them across the country, from their foreclosed Bel-Air mansion to the upstate New York home of the eldest Wang daughter.
What emerges is a road trip novel soaked in humiliation, family love, and comedy so dark it glows. Jade Chang has a sentence-level talent that is frankly jaw-dropping, and she never lets her characters become caricatures even when the situations veer into farce. This is the book I’d give to anyone who found the wealth in Kwan’s trilogy slightly alienating.
Why it works: It’s funnier than it has any right to be given the subject matter, and the Wangs feel like a real family chaotic, loving, infuriating.
The Windfall by Diksha Basu
Set in Delhi, this novel follows a middle-class Indian couple, the Jhas, who come into unexpected wealth when Mr. Jha sells a website domain. Their immediate decision to relocate to a fancier neighborhood sets off a chain reaction of status anxiety, marital tension, and genuinely hilarious social climbing. Even Kevin Kwan himself has stated that The Windfall nearly caused him to fall out of bed laughing. That’s the kind of endorsement that should be printed on every cover in 48-point type.
Why it works: Basu understands something Kwan also grasps intuitively: the obsession with wealth is never really about money. It’s about belonging, about being seen, about the terror of being left behind. The Jhas are so recognizable it’s almost uncomfortable.
If you’re looking for: Crazy Rich Asians energy but with an Indian setting and slightly gentler satire.
The Majesties by Tiffany Tsao
Here’s the pick for readers who found the darker undercurrents of Kwan’s trilogy more compelling than the couture. Tsao’s novel opens with a poisoning 300 guests at a family dinner party and works backward to explain how it happened. Set among Jakarta’s ultra-wealthy Chinese Indonesian families, the novel revolves around two sisters and explores the dubious history of the Sulinado family, with its corrupt businessmen, fake deaths, religious conversions, murders, abusive spouses, and racism within Chinese communities.
Why it works: The Majesties proves that extreme wealth in fiction doesn’t have to mean comedy. Tsao builds dread with surgical precision, and the portrait of family loyalty twisted into something monstrous is deeply affecting. This is the literary thriller in Crazy Rich Asians clothing.
Five Star Billionaire by Tash Aw
Five Malaysian-Chinese characters arrive in Shanghai, each chasing a different version of the dream the city seems to promise. Tash Aw gives us the full panoramic view of aspiration, identity, and dislocation in a city where everything is being reinvented in real time. The novel explores life in modern-day Shanghai through five distinct Malaysian-Chinese voices, a city constantly evolving and ever-changing where characters bring their dreams and hopes to its restless landscape.
Why it works: Where Kwan is intimate and gossipy, Aw is wide-eyed and sociological. He’s trying to capture something enormous the psychological texture of New China and he largely succeeds. The result feels essential, not just entertaining.
Sarong Party Girls by Cheryl Lu-Lien Tan
Back to Singapore, but a very different Singapore from the one Kwan inhabits. Set in Singapore, this novel follows a group of friends in search of rich expat husbands. The protagonist, Jazzy, is 26 years old and decides she and her three best girlfriends must land themselves rich Western expat husbands before they turn 27. Their ultimate goal is to get married and have what they see as ultimate status symbols.
Written entirely in Singlish Singapore’s extraordinary creole English this novel is either brilliantly conceived or a bold miscalculation, and I have thought about this question more than I care to admit. I land on “brilliantly conceived.” Jazzy is deeply flawed in ways that are recognizable and humanizing, and Tan never condescends to her characters even when she’s clearly amused by them.
Why it works: It offers the flip side of the Kwan equation. Instead of old money defending itself against new, Sarong Party Girls shows the view from further down the social ladder the people who see wealth as an escape hatch, not a birthright.
What We Were Promised by Lucy Tan
A Chinese-American family returns to Shanghai after twenty years in the United States and installs themselves in a gleaming luxury serviced apartment complex. The novel features the thoughts and motivations of characters who come from different economic backgrounds but are forced to interact with each other, exploring what happens when people have to adapt to their own culture again after living abroad for so long.
Lucy Tan’s debut is one of the most quietly devastating novels I’ve read in years. The wealth here is window dressing for a story about what we owe each other and what we give up for comfort. The housekeeper’s storyline, in particular, haunts me still.
Why it works: If Crazy Rich Asians is the party, What We Were Promised is the morning after. It sits with the consequences that Kwan, wisely for his purposes, largely skips.
One for the Fans of Kwan’s Satirical Bite
Big Little Lies by Liane Moriarty
I know what you’re thinking: this isn’t Asian fiction. You’re right. But if the darker elements of Crazy Rich Asians appealed to you, Liane Moriarty offers a deep dive into the lives of the mundanely powerful and wealthy, and her exploration of appearance versus truth, of lies versus secrets, is dark and delicious and wholly addicting.
Moriarty’s Big Little Lies is the rare novel that works simultaneously as breezy page-turner and genuinely unsettling examination of how wealth insulates people from accountability. The HBO adaptation is terrific, but please, read the book first.
Why it works: Kwan and Moriarty are both ferocious satirists of privilege. They just aim at slightly different targets with slightly different weapons.
The Deeper Cut
If I Had Your Face by Frances Cha
Four young women sharing an apartment in Seoul, each navigating Korea’s brutal beauty standards, K-pop obsessions, and rigid class hierarchies. Cha’s debut novel is small-scale compared to Kwan’s maximalism, but it offers something arguably more valuable: a ground-level view of what it costs to be young, female, and aspirational in contemporary Asia.
Why it works: The characters in Crazy Rich Asians can afford to play the social game because they were born with chips on the table. The women in If I Had Your Face are playing for their lives. The contrast is illuminating.
The Nest by Cynthia D’Aprix Sweeney
Four adult siblings have quietly structured their entire lives around the expectation of inheriting a trust fund, only to discover the money might not be coming. The interpersonal dynamics of Kwan’s books, especially when it comes to family and familial wealth, are mirrored in Sweeney’s novel about siblings who have built their lives around the promise of gaining access to their collective trust fund, and when they realize the reality of their inheritance, it causes deep rifts and reveals dark, painful truths.
This one is New York rather than Singapore, and decidedly less glamorous, but the family dynamics are just as treacherous and just as darkly funny. The Plumbs are the Youngs without the private jets, and they’re every bit as messy.
A Word on What Makes These Books Matter
There’s a reason the search for books like Crazy Rich Asians has been such a persistent one since 2013, and it’s not just because readers want more champagne towers and outrageous wedding drama (though, for the record, there is nothing wrong with wanting exactly that).
Crazy Rich Asians arrived at a specific cultural moment and answered a specific cultural hunger: the hunger to see Asian characters at the center of a story that wasn’t about war, poverty, immigration trauma, or the burden of the model minority myth. Rachel Chu is an economics professor navigating a romantic crisis. She’s not a metaphor. She’s a person. That sounds like a low bar, and in 2013, it genuinely was.
The steady success of Crazy Rich Asians, leading three weekends at the box office in an historically lean August, was proof not only of the film’s warm reception but of a yearning for more stories centered on Asian and Asian American characters. Director Jon M. Chu called it “only the beginning,” and the books on this list suggest he was right.
When you pick up any of these twelve novels, you’re not doing homework. You’re not improving yourself or checking a box. You’re choosing to spend time with characters whose stories were, for a very long time, considered too niche for the mainstream American market a judgment that now looks not just wrong but genuinely embarrassing. These writers always had these stories to tell. We’re lucky they kept telling them anyway.
Now close this tab and go read something.
Looking for a place to start? First-time readers to this genre might want to begin with The Windfall for its broad humor and accessibility, or Pachinko if you’re ready for something that will rearrange your internal furniture. Both are worth every page.