1981Obasan
Joy Kogawa
A schoolteacher, Naomi Nakane, pieces together the wartime uprooting of her Japanese-Canadian family: torn from their Vancouver home in 1942, interned in the interior British Columbia ghost town of Slocan, then forced onto the Alberta beet farms, while her mother, trapped in Japan, is lost to the Nagasaki bomb. Kogawa maps the real geography of the internment: the seized coastal home, the mountain camp, the prairie exile, and the silence her aunt Obasan keeps over it all.
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