At the heart of Silent Honor is an 18-year-old student named Hiroko Takashimaya. Sent to California from Japan by her father, Hiroko is caught in the midst of a terrifying conflict when the bombs fall on Pearl Harbor. Suddenly, she becomes an enemy in a foreign land and she cannot go home. Along with thousands of others, she must forsake her freedom. For Hiroko, internment is especially cruel. She and young American Peter Jenkins are in love. Now...

"Recruited from small Southern towns and posh New England colleges, 10,000 American women served the U.S. Army and Navy as code breakers during World War II. While their brothers and husbands took up arms, these women moved to Washington and, under strict vows of secrecy, learned the meticulous work of breaking German and Japanese military codes. Poring over reams of encrypted messages, the women worked tirelessly in makeshift facilities in Washington,...

Somewhere in South America, at the home of the country's vice president, a lavish birthday party is being held in honor of Mr. Hosokawa, a powerful Japanese businessman. Roxanne Coss, opera's most revered soprano, has mesmerized the international guests with her singing. It is a perfect evening -- until a band of gun-wielding terrorists breaks in through the air-conditioning vents and takes the entire party hostage. But what begins as a panicked,...

In war-torn France, Jo McMahon, an Italian-Irish girl from the tenements of Brooklyn, tends to six seriously wounded soldiers in a makeshift medical unit. Enemy bombs have destroyed her hospital convoy, and now Jo singlehandedly struggles to keep her patients and herself alive in a cramped and freezing tent close to German troops. There is a growing tenderness between her and one of her patients, a Scottish officer, but Jo's heart is seared by the...

In 1990 author Kyoko Mori returned to her native Japan to visit the "landscape of my childhood." There-looking for the house in which her mother killed herself, running on land that was once water, and retracing childhood train trips to her grandparents' farm-she relived the memories and uncovered the secrets that unlocked her past. In The Dream of Water, a series of chapters that are themselves "small perfections," she leads us to the "larger happiness"...

"The attack on Pearl Harbor changes everything for Lana Hitchcock. Arriving home on the Big Island too late to reconcile with her estranged father, she is left alone to untangle the clues of his legacy, which lead to a secret property tucked away in the remote rain forest of Kilauea volcano. When the government starts taking away neighbors as suspected sympathizers, Lana shelters two young German girls, a Japanese fisherman and his son. As tensions...

"In this enduring and internationally popular novel, Mark Twain combines social satire and dime-novel sensation with a rhapsody on boyhood and on America's pre-industrial past. Tom Sawyer is resilient, enterprising, and vainglorious. In a series of adventures along the banks of the Mississippi, he usually manages to come out on top. From petty triumphs over his friends and over his long-suffering Aunt Polly, to his intervention in a murder trial,...

"There's no right way to keep a diary, but if there's an entertaining way, David Sedaris seems to have mastered it. If it's navel-gazing you're after, you've come to the wrong place; ditto treacly self-examination. Rather, his observations turn outward: a fight between two men on a bus, a fight between two men on the street, pedestrians being whacked over the head or gathering to watch as a man considers leaping to his death. There's a dirty joke...

The author of "Even Cowgirls Get the Blues" assembles a series of seemingly non-integratable components -- American deserters from Vietnam, generations of women absorbed by Japanese folklore, circuses -- into a satisfying love story.

Somewhere a Song opens the day after Pearl Harbor as the daughters of newspaper tycoon Keegan Hayes suffer the aftermath on three different continents journalist Cameron Hayes in Moscow, searching for the half-brother she's never met; Jackie in California, dangerously aligning herself with the Japanese community; and Blair in Manila, desperately seeking the whereabouts of her estranged army officer husband even as she is caught up in the terror of...