A vivid and powerful novel set in post-WWII Japan, Fireflies chronicles the lives of four interweaving characters navigating the burned-out streets of Tokyo during the beginning of the American occupation.
“The war is over, I told myself, dumbly. It’s all over. And we are alive.”
August, 1945. Japan has been defeated. The country lies in ruins.
Satsuko Takara and her teenage brother, Hiroshi, have lost their parents, and each other, during the firestorm that devastated Tokyo five months before. Hal Lynch, a haunted US reconnaissance photographer, has now turned photojournalist in Japan, where he stumbles across a shocking story, concealed in the aftermath of war, which he is determined to bring to light.
And Osamu Maruki, a dissolute writer, once Satsuko’s beloved, has finally returned from the South Pacific, a broken and changed man.
As these character's stories spin out and converge, the war-torn streets of Tokyo come alive in this dazzlingly observed novel. Cinematic, brutal, yet beautiful, Fireflies powerfully portrays the shock, the struggles and the choices that arise from the destruction of war.Publication date: October 2013
FICTION/Literary * 978-1-77089-391-7 * 336 pages * $19.95 Trade paperback
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