Requiem - Softcover

Bin Okuma, a celebrated visual artist, has quite suddenly lost his beloved wife, Lena. He and his son, Greg, are left to deal with the shock. But Greg must return to his studies on the East Coast, and Bin finds himself alone in ways he has never imagined. Trying to pull together an exhibition of his art, he is drawn into painful memories he has avoided for much of his life.

After the attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, Bin’s Japanese Canadian family was uprooted from the west coast of Vancouver Island and transported to an internment camp in the mountains. They spent almost five years there, struggling against poverty and shame. Now, many years later, Bin drives across the country to revisit the places that have shaped him and to see his estranged father. But does he really want to reunite with the man who abandoned him and separated him from his mother? With the persuasive voice of his wife in his head and the echo of their love in his heart, Bin embarks on an unforgettable journey, one that encompasses art and music, love and hope, loss and redemption. 

Frances Itani has created a spellbinding novel of extraordinary beauty, an elegiac yet intimate story of a family caught in the arc of history. 

FRANCES ITANI has written sixteen books. Her novels include Tell, shortlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize; Requiem, chosen by the Washington Post as one of the top fiction titles of 2012; Remembering the Bones, published internationally and shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize; and the #1 bestseller Deafening, which won a Commonwealth Writers’ Prize and was shortlisted for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, selected for CBC’s Canada Reads and published in seventeen territories. A Member of the Order of Canada and a three-time winner of the CBC Literary Award, Frances Itani lives in Ottawa.