War Trauma

With the Second World War only a few years in the past, and Japan still reeling from its effects, two sisters - born to the same father but different mothers - struggle to make sense of the new world in which they are coming of age. Asako, the younger, has become obsessed with locating a third sibling, while also experiencing love for the first time. While Momoko, their father's first child - haunted by the loss of her kamikaze boyfriend and their final, disturbing days together - seeks comfort in a series of unhealthy romances.

In 1987, Angela Findlay walked into a prison and instantly but inexplicably felt at home. For years she had wrestled with a sense of 'badness' within her. But working with prisoners was just the beginning of her search for answers that took her to Nazi Germany and the life of her dead grandfather, who, it emerged, was a decorated general on the Eastern front. In a rare confluence of memoir, psychology and historical detective story, this is Findlay's account of her unflinching quest for the truth about her German family.

Ruth Clare's father came back from the Vietnam War a changed man: a violent, controlling parent and a dominating, aggressive husband. After escaping her difficult upbringing, Ruth went on to have a family of her own. Facing the challenges of parenting brought her past back to life, and she lived in fear that she was doomed to repeat her father's behaviour. Wanting to understand the experiences that had damaged her father, she met with other veterans and began listening to their stories of war, conscription and returning to civilian life.

Zazoo, almost 14, is Vietnamese by birth but feels entirely French. She lives with her adoptive grandfather, who brought her form Vietnam to his village in France when she was just two years old. Life with Grand-Pierre has always been filled with poetry and shared adventure, following the predictable rhythms of the season. Then one misty October morning, a boy on a bicycle rides into Ago's small French village and asks a question from which many stories begin to unfold.

Emma-Jade and Louis are born into the havoc of the Vietnam War. Orphaned, saved and cared for by adults coping with the chaos of Saigon in free-fall, they become children of the Vietnamese diaspora. Em is not a romance in any usual sense of the word, but it is a word whose homonym—aimer, to love—resonates in every minute, a book powered by love in the larger sense. A portrait of Vietnamese identity emerges that is wholly remarkable, honed in wartime violence that borders on genocide, and then by the ingenuity, sheer grit, and intelligence of Vietnamese people.