San Antonio College Library

Otsuka's commanding debut novel paints a portrait of the Japanese internment camps unlike any previously written--a haunting evocation of a family in wartime and an unmistakably resonant lesson for our times.

The drama of a young Japanese woman who comes to the U.S. to attend college and falls in love with a white American. She is Hiroko, he is Peter, and their romance is shattered by Pearl Harbor. He goes off to war, she to a concentration camp. Life will reunite them, but will it be the same? She is a changed woman.