Her wisdom is staggeringly beautiful, implicating each of us. (Irish Times )

Her wisdom is staggeringly beautiful, implicating each of us. (Irish Times )

After the First World War, a group of young women is brought by boat from Japan to San Francisco. They are picture brides, promised the American Dream, clutching photographs of the husbands they have yet to meet, imagining uncertain futures on unknown shores.

Struggling to master a new language and culture, they experience tremulous first nights as new wives, backbreaking work in the fields and in the homes of white women, and, later, the raising of children who will ultimately reject their heritage and their history.

And then war arrives once more.

Julie Otsuka tells their extraordinary, heartbreaking story in this spellbinding and poetic account of strangers lost and alone in a new and deeply foreign land.