June Book Club: When the Emperor Was Divine by Julie Otsuka

Thursday June 27, 2024 7pm - 8:30pm

This June, the Golden Braid Books Community Book Club is reading When the Emperor Was Divine by Julie Otsuka.

We have lots of copies in stock, so come on by and get yours today! Keep in touch with us throughout the month on our Instagram and Facebook pages, and then we’ll convene here at the Braid for our book club meeting to talk about the book, meet some new folks, and share some insights and mutual love of reading.

About the Book:

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 have been reclassified, virtually overnight, as enemy aliens and are about to be uprooted from their home and sent to a dusty incarceration camp in the Utah desert.

In this lean and devastatingly evocative first novel, Julie Otsuka tells their story from five flawlessly realized points of view and conveys the exact emotional texture of their experience: the thin-walled barracks and barbed-wire fences, the omnipresent fear and loneliness, the unheralded feats of heroism. When the Emperor Was Divine is a work of enormous power that makes a shameful episode of our history as immediate as today's headlines.