Phantoms: A Novel Hardback - 2019

Liveright, 2019. First Edition. Hardback. Very Good/Very Good. A copy that has been read, but is in excellent condition. Pages are intact and not marred by notes or highlighting. The spine remains undamaged. Torn apart by war and bigotry, two families confront long-buried secrets in this haunting American novel of World War II and Vietnam. Ray Takahashi's return from the battlefields of World War II should have be en triumphant, but the fragrant, budding orchards of his rural Northern Cal ifornia home hide a secret that has destroyed everything he holds dear. Wit h his hair now trimmed short and his newly broadened shoulders filling in h is uniform, nineteen-year-old Ray approaches the small house in which he gr ew up, tucked behind rows of plum trees he planted with his father, only to find it occupied by a family he has does not know, a white family. Two decades later, John Frazier adjusts to his own homecoming. Detoxing fro m a dope addiction acquired in the barracks of Vietnam, yet still aching to write the next great American novel, he struggles to silence the phantoms that have trailed him from the muddy jungles. Frazier's ambitions are put o n hold when he finds himself an unwitting witness to a confrontation, decad es in the making, between two steely matriarchs: his aunt, Evelyn Wilson, a nd her former neighbor, Kimiko Takahashi. From the halcyon days of pre-World War II Newcastle, when fruit trees glowed like jewels, through the dusty, cramped nights of Tule Lake, and the wayward years of the post-Vietnam era, Phantoms weaves the splintered stories of two families as they seek an impossible closure. A jarring examination of the personal cost of American exceptionalism and imperi.