Product Description
When The Emperor Was Divine
Author: Julie Otsuka
Format: Paperback
'A compelling, powerful portrait of a terrible endurance. Terrific' — The Times
Four months after Pearl Harbor, signs begin appearing up and down the West Coast instructing all persons of Japanese ancestry to report to 'assembly centers'. For one family - reclassified, virtually overnight, as unwelcome enemies - it is the beginning of a nightmare of oppression and alienation that will alter their lives forever.
There is the mother, reeling from the order to 'evacuate', and the daughter, travelling on the long train journey away from freedom. There is the son, who struggles to adapt to their new life in the dust of the Utah desert, and the father, who, after four bitter years in captivity, returns to his family a stranger.
Based on a true story, Julie Otsuka's powerful, deeply humane first novel tells of a forgotten generation who found themselves imprisoned in their own country, and evokes an unjustly overlooked episode in America's wartime history.
'Outstandingly accomplished and moving' — Sunday Telegraph
'Exceptional' — New Yorker
Longlisted for the Orange Prize
Winner of the Asian American Literary Award 2003
Winner of the American Library Association Alex Award 2003
About the Author
Julie Otsuka was born and raised in California. She pursued a career as a painter for several years before turning to fiction writing at age 30. She is the author of When the Emperor Was Divine, which was longlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction, The Buddha in the Attic, which won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction in 2012, and The Swimmers. She is a recipient of the Asian American Literary Award, France's Prix Femina Étranger, and a Guggenheim Fellowship, and was a finalist for the National Book Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. She lives in New York City.
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