Hotel on the Corner of Bitter & Sweet by Jamie Ford

In 1986, Henry Lee joins a crowd outside the Panama Hotel, once the gateway to Seattle's Japantown. Boarded for decades, the new owner has discovered the belongings of Japanese families who were sent to internment camps during WWII. Henry, a Chinese American, remembers a young Japanese American girl from his childhood in the 1940s--Keiko Okabe. After Keiko and her family were evacuated to the internment camps, she and Henry could only hope that their promise to each other would be kept. Now, forty years later, Henry explores the hotel's basement for the Okabe family's belongings and for a long-lost object whose value he cannot even begin to measure.

Jamie Ford, 2009

Paperback, Very Good

303 pages

240g

20.3 x 13 x 2 cm