Snow Falling on Cedars

Winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award American Booksellers Association Book of the Year Award San Pietro Island, north of Puget Sound, is a place so isolated that no one who lives there can afford to make enemies. But in 1954 a local fisherman is found suspiciously drowned, and a Japanese American named Kabua Miyamoto is charged with his murder. In the course of the ensuing trial, it becomes clear that what is at stake is more than a man's guilt. For on San Pedro, memory grows as thickly as cedar trees and the fields of ripe strawberries--memories of a charmed love affair between a white boy and the Japanese girl who grew up to become Kabua's wife; memories of land desired, paid for, and lost. Above all, San Piedra is haunted by the memory of what happened to its Japanese residents during World War II, when an entire community was sent into exile while its neighbors watched. Gripping, tragic, and densely atmospheric, Snow Falling on Cedars is a masterpiece of suspense-- one that leaves us shaken and changed. Haunting.... A whodunit completes with courtroom maneuvering and surprising turns of evidence and at the same time a mystery, something altogether richer and deeper. --Los Angeles Times Compelling...heart stopping. Finely wrought, flawlessly written. --The New York Times Book Review