From the bestselling, award-winning author of The Buddha in the Attic and The Swimmers, this commanding debut novel paints a portrait of the Japanese American incarceration camps that is both a haunting evocation of a family in wartime and a resonant lesson for our times.
On a sunny day in Berkeley, California, in 1942, a woman sees a sign in a post office window, returns to her home, and matter-of-factly begins to pack her...

For fourteen-year-old budding artist Minoru Ito, her two brothers, her friends, and the other members of the Japanese-American community in southern California, the three months since Pearl Harbor was attacked have become a waking nightmare: attacked, spat on, and abused with no way to retaliate--and now things are about to get worse, their lives forever changed by the mass incarcerations in the relocation camps. --

"As often as possible, high school senior Reiko Smith-Mori drives to the nearby California desert to escape from the increasingly claustrophobic life at home and her parents' expectations, and there she meets Seth Rogers, a boy from school who shares her love of the desert but also wants a closer relationship with Reiko, which is just adding to her problems--because Reiko has a secret: in her mind her older sister, Mika, who died years ago, is always...