What is "One Book, One Campus?"
David Guterson, A Brief Biography
About Snow Falling on Cedars
From the back cover...
San Piedro Island, north of Puget Sound, is a place so isolated that no one who lives there can afford to make enemies. But in 1954 a local fisherman is found suspiciously drowned, and a Japanese American named Kabuo Miyamoto is charged with his murder.
In the course of the ensuing trial, it becomes clear that what is at stake is more than one man's guilt. For on San Piedro, memory grows as thickly as cedar trees and the fields of ripe strawberries -- memories of a charmed love affair between a white boy and the Japanese girl who grew up to become Kabuo's wife; memories of land desired, paid for, and lost. Above all, San Piedro is haunted by the memory of what happened to its Japapnese residents during World War II, when an entire community was sent into exile while its neighbors watched.
Awards and Reviews
Winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award (1995)
American Booksellers Association Book of the Year Award (1996)
"Haunting.... A whodunit complete with courtroom maneuvering and surprising turns of evidence and at the same time a mystery, something altogether richer and deeper."
-- Los Angeles Times"Compelling...heartstopping. Finely wrought, flawlessly written."
-- The New York Times Book Review"Luminous...a beatuifully assured and full-bodied novel [that] becomes a tender examination of fairness and forgiveness...Guterson has fashioned something haunting and true."
-- Pico Iyer, Time"This is the kind of book where you can smell and hear and see the fictional world the writer has created, so palpably does the atmosphere come through. Set on an island in the straits north of Puget Sound, in Washington, where everyone is either a fisherman or a berry farmer, the story is nominally about a murder trial. But since it's set in the 1950s, lingering memories of World War II, internment camps and racism helps fuel suspicion of a Japanese-American
fisherman, a lifelong resident of the islands. It's a great story, but the primary pleasure of the book is Guterson's renderings of the people and the place."
-- Amazon.com"A luxurious book whose finely detailed evocation of its small-town setting effectively draws the reader to consider its larger issues."
-- Publishers Weekly
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Last updated 01/11/2007