Japanese Lover

When Alma Belasco's native Poland falls under the looming shadow of the Nazis and her parents send her away to an aunt and uncle in their opulent mansion in San Francisco, she can't believe she'll find her place among these people who are both family and strangers. But then she meets the gardener's son, Ichimei Fukuda, and a tender love blossoms. After Pearl Harbor, thousands of Japanese Americans, including the Fukuda family, are relocated to internment camps, and the two teenagers are separated. Throughout their lifetimes, they manage to reunite, but theirs is a love they are forever forced to hide from the prejudiced eyes of the world. Decades later as Alma nears the end of her long life, Irina Bazili, a care worker struggling to come to terms with her own troubled past, meets the older woman and her grandson Seth at the eccentric Lark House nursing home. As the pair forge a friendship, they begin to investigate a series of mysterious gifts and letters sent to Alma and discover the existence of her secret Japanese lover. Moving back and forth between WWII-era San Francisco and the present day, The Japanese Lover is an exquisite, multi-generational love story that explores race and identity, abandonment and reconciliation. This powerful new novel from the internationally acclaimed author of The House of the Spirits evokes both the horrific acts and beautiful deeds of which humans are capable.