a satisfying and heart-wrenching tale.” - Deseret Morning News “A poignant story that transports the reader back in time. The period detail so revealing and so well rendered.” - The Seattle Times “A wartime-era Chinese-Japanese variation on Romeo and Juliet . “Mesmerizing and evocative, a tale of conflicted loyalties and timeless devotion.” -Sara Gruen, bestselling author of Water for Elephants And, more important, it will make you feel.” -Garth Stein, bestselling author of The Art of Racing in the Rain This is a beautifully written book that will make you think. “A tender and satisfying novel set in a time and a place lost forever, Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet gives us a glimpse of the damage that is caused by war-not the sweeping damage of the battlefield but the cold, cruel damage to the hearts and humanity of individual people. Praise for Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet His search will take him on a journey to revisit the sacrifices he has made for family, for love, for country.

Now, forty years later, Henry explores the hotel’s basement for the Okabe family’s belongings and for a long-lost object whose value he cannot even begin to measure. After Keiko and her family were evacuated to the internment camps, she and Henry could only hope that their promise to each other would be kept. As the owner displays and unfurls a Japanese parasol, Henry, a Chinese American, remembers a young Japanese American girl from his childhood in the 1940s-Keiko Okabe, with whom he forged a bond of friendship and innocent love that transcended the prejudices of their Old World ancestors. It has been boarded up for decades, but now the new owner has discovered the belongings of Japanese families who were sent to internment camps during World War II. In 1986, Henry Lee joins a crowd outside the Panama Hotel, once the gateway to Seattle’s Japantown. “An impressive, bitter, and sweet debut that explores the age-old conflicts between father and son, the beauty and sadness of what happened to Japanese Americans in the Seattle era during World War II, and the depths and longing of deep-heart love.”-Lisa See.

Corner of bitter and sweet hotel