After bombs rain down on Pearl Harbor, 14-year-old Lucy Takeda and her mother, Miyako, are rounded up--along with thousands of other innocent Japanese-Americans--and taken to the Manzanar prison camp where they endure abuse and harsh living conditions until Miyako makes the ultimate sacrifice.

"From the two-time National Book Award winning author of The Snow Leopard and Shadow Country, a short, powerful novel about an American professor of Holocaust Studies who, over the course of a weeklong spiritual retreat at Auschwitz, is forced to grapple with his own past and a family secret: the Jewish mother abandoned to her doom by his Gentile father"--

Julie Otsuka's commanding debut novel paints a portrait of the Japanese internment camps unlike any we have ever seen. With crystalline intensity and precision, Otsuka uses a single family to evoke the deracination-both physical and emotional-of a generation of Japanese Americans. In five chapters, each flawlessly executed from a different point of view-the mother receiving the order to evacuate; the daughter on the long train ride to the camp; the...

Follows Dita Kraus from age fourteen, when she is put in charge of a few forbidden books at Auschwitz concentration camp, through the end of World War II and beyond.

Set against a vivid backdrop of war and change, Silent Honour tells of the triumph of a woman caught between cultures and determined to survive. In August 1941 Hiroko, eighteen years old and torn between her mother's belief in ancient traditions and her father's passion for modern ideas, leaves Kyoto to come to America for an education. To Hiroko, California is a different world - a world of barbecues, station wagons and college. Her cousins in California...