The Gods of Heavenly Punishment: A Novel
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4.4 • 14 Ratings
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
"Showcases war’s bitter ironies…as well as its romantic serendipities." —Vogue
One summer night in prewar Japan, eleven-year-old Billy Reynolds takes snapshots at his parents’ dinner party. That same evening his father Anton—a prominent American architect—begins a torrid affair with the wife of his master carpenter. A world away in New York, Cameron Richards rides a Ferris wheel with his sweetheart and dreams about flying a plane. These three men will all draw together to shape the fate of a young girl caught in the midst of one of World War II’s most horrific events—the 1945 firebombing of Tokyo
Exquisitely rendered, The Gods of Heavenly Punishment tells the stories of families on both sides of the Pacific: their loves and infidelities, their dreams and losses—and their shared connection to one of the most devastating acts of war in human history.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In Epstein's expansive novel, American and Japanese lives converge and diverge in wartime. The novel follows the cultured Yoshi, a trilingual musician and product of a mismatched marriage her mother a troubled, Westernized beauty; her father a working-class traditionalist. At the onset of WWII, young Yoshi, living alone with her mother in Japan, receives a ring from her father, who is living abroad. The ring once belonged to a young American pilot whose fate Yoshi's father may be tied to. As the war escalates, Yoshi survives the Americans' firebombing that obliterates Tokyo with "a roar so deafening that the screaming world went quiet." After the war is over, Yoshi, working as a piano player in a brothel meets Billy, a shy GI carrying his own burden. Billy brings Yoshi closer to a new life and to painful truths about her past and the original owner of her ring. From unspeakable wartime atrocities to the intricacies of courtships, friendships, and illicit affairs, Epstein's second novel (after The Painter from Shanghai) is bursting with characters and locales. Yet painful, authentic (Epstein has lived and worked in Asia), and exquisite portraits emerge of the personal impact of national conflicts and how sometimes those conflicts can be bridged by human connections.
