The Buddha in the Attic
Julie Otsuka
'An understated masterpiece' San Francisco Chronicle
'Her wisdom is staggeringly beautiful, implicating each of us' Irish Times
After the First World War, a group of young women is brought by boat from Japan to San Francisco. They are picture brides, promised the American Dream, clutching photographs of the husbands they have yet to meet, imagining uncertain futures on unknown shores.
Struggling to master a new language and culture, they experience tremulous first nights as new wives, backbreaking work in the fields and in the homes of white women, and, later, the raising of children who will ultimately reject their heritage and their history.
And then war arrives once more.
Julie Otsuka tells their extraordinary, heartbreaking story in this spellbinding and poetic account of strangers lost and alone in a new and deeply foreign land.
'A tender, nuanced, empathetic exploration of the sorrows and consolations of a whole generation of women' Daily Telegraph
WINNER OF THE PEN FAULKNER AWARD FOR FICTION 2012
SHORTLISTED FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR FICTION 2011
SHORTLISTED FOR THE LOS ANGELES TIMES BOOK PRIZE 2011
Product Details
About Julie Otsuka
Reviews for The Buddha in the Attic
Daily Mail
Paints a poignant, moving portrait of immigration by deftly weaving together a chorus of voices. Fascinating and tragic in equal measure
Easy Living
A tender, nuanced, empathetic exploration of the sorrows and consolations of a whole generation of women
Telegraph
A haunting and heartbreaking look at the immigrant experience . . . Otsuka's keenly observed prose manages to capture whole histories in a sweep of gorgeous incantatory sentences
Marie Claire
Novels written in the first person plural are rare. It's a narrative device that gives The Buddha in the Attic a deliciously melancholy quality . . . Powerful, lyrical and almost unbearably sad
Psychologies
Powerfully moving . . . intensely lyrical . . . verges on the edge of poetry
Independent
The tone is often incantatory, and though the language is direct, unconvoluted, almost without metaphor, its true and very unusual merit lies, I think, in that indefinable quality we call poetry
Ursula Le Guin
Guardian
A kind of collective memoir that squeezes volumes of experience into a small space . . . more than a history lesson because Otsuka compresses the individual emotions into one haunting story
The Times
Her trick is to sum up a few life story in a few tantalising sentences, moving on to the next at lightning speed. The result is panoramic, each line opening a window on to the world of one woman after another, pinpointing each one's hopes and happiness or misery and pain
Sunday Express
Intriguing . . . fleeting, singular images pile up and reverberate against each other to strange, memorable effect
Metro
Spare but resonant, powerful, evocative
The New York Times Book Review
Spare and stunning . . . Otsuka has created a tableau as intricate as the pen strokes her humble immigrant girls learned to use in letters to loved ones they'd never see again
Oprah Magazine
A delicate, heartbreaking portrait . . . beautifully rendered . . . Otsuka's prose is precise and rich with imagery. [Readers] will finish this exceptional book profoundly moved.
Publishers Weekly
This chorus of narrators speaks in a poetry that is both spare and passionate, sure to haunt even the most coldhearted among us
Chicago Tribune
A stunning feat of empathetic imagination and emotional compression, capturing the experience of thousands of women
Vogue
A lithe stunner
Elle
To watch Emperor catching on with teachers and students in vast numbers is to grasp what must have happened at the outset for novels like Lord of the Flies and To Kill a Mockingbird
The New York Times on When the Emperor was Divine