<b>Finalist for the 2011 National Book Award<br><br></b><br>Julie Otsuka's long awaited follow-up to <i>When the Emperor Was Divine </i>(“To watch <i>Emperor</i> catching on with teachers and students in vast numbers is to grasp what must have happened at the outset for novels like <i>Lord of the Flies</i> and <i>To Kill a Mockingbird</i>” —<i>The New York Times</i>) is a tour de force of economy and precision, a novel that tells the story of a group of young women brought over from Japan to San Francisco as 'picture brides' nearly a century ago.<br><br> In eight incantatory sections, <i>The Buddha in the Attic</i> traces their extraordinary lives, from their arduous journey by boat, where they exchange photographs of their husbands, imagining uncertain futures in an unknown land; to their arrival in San Francisco and their tremulous first nights as new wives; to their backbreaking work picking fruit in the fields and scrubbing the floors of white women; to their struggles to master a new language and a new culture; to their experiences in childbirth, and then as mothers, raising children who will ultimately reject their heritage and their history; to the deracinating arrival of war.<br> <br>In language that has the force and the fury of poetry, Julie Otsuka has written a singularly spellbinding novel about the American dream.