When the Emperor Was Divine Book + PRICE WATCH * Amazon pricing is not included in price watch

When the Emperor Was Divine Book

When the Emperor Was Divine : Paperback : Random House USA Inc : 9780385721813 : 0385721811 : 14 Oct 2003 : 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 family's possessions. Like thousands of other Japanese Americans they...Read More

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  • Amazon Review

    A precise, understated gem of a first novel, Julie Otsuka's When the Emperor Was Divine tells one Japanese American family's story of internment in a Utah enemy alien camp during World War II. We never learn the names of the young boy and girl who were forced to leave their Berkeley home in 1942 and spend over three years in a dusty, barren desert camp with their mother. Occasional, heavily censored letters arrive from their father, who had been taken from their house in his slippers by the FBI one night and was being held in New Mexico, his fate uncertain. But even after the war, when they have been reunited and are putting their stripped, vandalized house back together, the family can never regain its pre-war happiness. Broken by circumstance and prejudice, they will continue to pay, in large and small ways, for the shape of their eyes. When the Emperor Was Divine is written in deceptively tranquil prose, a distillation of injustice, anger, and poetry; a notable debut. --Regina Marler

  • Product Description

    Julie Otsukaâ??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 deracinationâ??both physical and emotionalâ??of a generation of Japanese Americans. In five chapters, each flawlessly executed from a different point of viewâ??the mother receiving the order to evacuate; the daughter on the long train ride to the camp; the son in the desert encampment; the familyâ??s return to their home; and the bitter release of the father after more than four years in captivityâ??she has created a small tour de force, a novel of unrelenting economy and suppressed emotion. Spare, intimate, arrestingly understated, When the Emperor Was Divine is a haunting evocation of a family in wartime and an unmistakably resonant lesson for our times. It heralds the arrival of a singularly gifted new novelist.


    From the Hardcover edition.

  • 0385721811
  • 9780385721813
  • Julie Otsuka
  • 1 October 2003
  • Anchor Books
  • Paperback (Book)
  • 160
  • Reprint
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