From 2025 Nebraska Book Award Winner for best fiction - D. D. Davenport

In April of 1942, thousands of Japanese families living in San Francisco were rounded up and sent to makeshift housing in the Utah desert. For one family, the journey began six decades earlier and 6,000 miles away, in a remote village on the northeast coast of Japan.

It is a love story. Toshi and Ayami were meant to be together, but it almost did not happen. Toshi led a privileged life in one of the world's largest cities. Ayami grew up on a small rice farm five hundred kilometers away.

Their first encounter was a chance meeting on a forest trail, but it took the ingenuity of a twelve-year-old girl and her father to bring them together. Having finally met, a new obstacle emerges. Ayami has a secret. And Toshi has one of his own. Should he follow his dream or follow his heart.

This is their story.