"A brilliantly inventive new novel about loss, growing up, and our relationship with things, by the Booker Prize-finalist author of A Tale for the Time Being After the tragic death his beloved musician father, fourteen-year-old Benny Oh begins to hear voices. The voices belong to the things in his house-a sneaker, a broken Christmas ornament, a piece of wilted lettuce. Although Benny doesn't understand what these things are saying, he can sense their...

When Ruth finds a piece of debris washed up on a beach on a remote island in the Pacific Northwest she discovers the diary of sixteen-year-old Nao, living in Tokyo, who decides that death is the only escape from her aching loneliness and her classmates' bullying, but before she ends it all, Nao first plans to document the life of her great grandmother, a Buddhist nun who's lived more than a century.

"In the aftermath of World War II, Ichiro, a Japanese American, returns home to Seattle to make a new start after two years in an internment camp and two years in prison for refusing to be drafted."--