"An engrossing and charming memoir about getting back to basics: home truths, family, and the life-altering, life-saving power f books." -Emma Donoghue, author of Room

The Reading List: Literature, Love and Back Again

Biographies & Memoirs

Shimotakahara, Leslie

Arts & Literature

Variety Crossing

A daughter’s search for her mother reveals her family’s past in a Japanese internment camp during the Second World War. Lily Takemitsu goes missing from her home in Toronto one luminous summer morning in the mid-1980s. Her daughter, Rita, knows her mother has a history of dissociation and memory problems, which have led her to wander off before. But never has she stayed away so long. Unconvinced the police are taking the case seriously, Rita begins to carry out her own investigation. In the course of searching for her mom, she is forced to confront a labyrinth of secrets surrounding the family’s internment at a camp in the California desert during the Second World War, their postwar immigration to Toronto, and the father she has never known. Epic in scope, intimate in style, After the Bloom blurs between the present and the ever-present past, beautifully depicting one family’s struggle to face the darker side of its history and find some form of redemption.

After the Bloom

Literature & Fiction

United States

Dundurn Press

Family secrets surface when two sisters travel to Hong Kong to care for their ill father. When Jill Lau receives an early morning phone call that her elderly father has fallen gravely ill, she and her sister, Celeste, catch the first flight from Toronto to Hong Kong. The man they find languishing in the hospital is a barely recognizable shadow of his old, indomitable self. According to his housekeeper, a couple of mysterious photographs arrived anonymously in the mail in the days before his collapse. These pictures are only the first link in a chain of events that begin to reveal the truth about their father’s past and how he managed to escape from Guangzhou, China, during the Cultural Revolution to make a new life for himself in Hong Kong. Someone from the old days has returned to haunt him — exposing the terrible things he did to survive and flee one of the most violent periods of Chinese history, reinvent himself, and make the family fortune. Can Jill piece together the story of her family’s past without sacrificing her father's love and reputation?

Red Oblivion

Sisters of the Spruce

Genre Fiction

Caitlin Press Inc.

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Books by Shimotakahara, Leslie