num_pages: 368
description: On San Piedro, an island of rugged, spectacular beauty in Puget Sound, home to salmon fishermen and strawberry farmers, a Japanese-American fisherman stands trial, charged with murder. The year is 1954, and the shadow of World War II, with its brutality abroad and internment of Japanese Americans at home, hangs over the courtroom. Ishmael Cambers, who lost an arm in the Pacific war and now runs the island newspaper inherited from his father, is among the journalists covering the trial--a trial that brings him close, once again, to Hatsue Miyamoto, the wife of the accused man and Ishmael's never-forgotten boyhood love.Hatsue and Ishmael, in the years before the war came between them, had dug clams together, picked strawberries in San Piedro's verdant fields, and passed long hours in the secrecy of a giant hollow cedar tree. Now, as a heavy snowfall impedes the progress of Kabuo Miyamoto's trial, they and the other participants mus come to a reckoning with the past, with culture, nature, and love, and with the possibilities of the human will. Both suspenseful and beautifully crafted, Snow Falling on Cedars portrays the psychology of a community, the ambiguities of justice, the racism that persists even between neighbors, and the necessity of individual moral action despite the indifference of nature and circumstance.(jacket description)
language: English
title: Snow Falling on Cedars
titlecomplete: Snow Falling on Cedars
characters: Ishmael Chambers, Hatsue Miyamoto, Carl Heine, Kabuo Miyamoto
genres: Mystery, Fiction, Classics, Adult Fiction, Historical, Historical Fiction, Literary Fiction, Romance, Literature, Novels
ratings_count: 184244
places: Pacific Northwest, Washington (state), San Piedro Island, Washington
awards: awardedAt: 788947200000
name: Anthony Award
category: Best First Novel, awardedAt: 788947200000
name: PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, awardedAt: 820483200000
name: American Booksellers Book Of The Year  Award
category: Adult Trade, awardedAt: 820483200000
name: Martin Beck Award, awardedAt: 757411200000
name: Barnes & Noble Discover Prize
publisher: Harcourt Brace & Company