Penance
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4.3 • 4 Ratings
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
'Kanae Minato is a brilliant storyteller' Emily St John Mandel, author of Station Eleven
When a group of young girls are approached by a stranger, they cannot know that the encounter will haunt them for the rest of their lives.
Hours later, Emily is dead. The surviving girls alone can identify the killer. But not one of them remembers his face...
Driven mad by grief, the victim's mother demands the girls find the murderer or else atone for their crimes. If they do neither, she will have her revenge. She will make them pay...
From the critically acclaimed author of Confessions, Penance is a dark and disturbing tale of revenge that will leave you reeling.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Minato's moving, tension-filled second novel charts the impact of a traumatic murder on four young women, Sae, Maki, Akiko, and Yuka, who were childhood friends of the victim, Emily. One summer day, when they're all 10, a strange man approaches the girls while they're playing ball by the swimming pool of their small, rural Japanese town's elementary school. The stranger, claiming he has no ladder, says he needs someone to help him reach a ventilating fan in a pool changing room. Emily goes with him. When she doesn't return, the other girls go looking for her only to discover her dead. Emily's mother blames the girls and warns them to "atone for what you've done, in a way I'll accept," if they can't find the murderer. Fifteen years later, with the statute of limitations running out, each survivor relates the consequences of that warning for herself. All these fully fleshed-out characters have suffered since Emily's death, each in her own way. Minato (Confessions) has crafted an unnerving tale of tragedy, guilt, and penance.
