"1942. Hannah Martel has narrowly escaped Nazi Germany. When her ship bound for America is turned away at port, she has nowhere to go but to her cousin Lily in Brussels. Fearful for her life, Hannah is desperate to get out of occupied Europe. But with no safe way to leave, she must return to the dangerous underground work she thought she had left behind. Seeking help, Hannah joins the Sapphire Line, a secret resistance network. But when a grave mistake...

Julie Otsuka's commanding debut novel paints a portrait of the Japanese internment camps unlike any we have ever seen. With crystalline intensity and precision, Otsuka uses a single family to evoke the deracination, both physical and emotional, of a generation of Japanese Americans. In five chapters, each flawlessly executed from a different point of view, the mother receiving the order to evacuate; the daughter on the long train ride to the camp;...

Ordered to play for the Jewish prisoners of a Nazi concentration camp, young German violinist Gottfried Keller reluctantly complies in spite of his growing horror about the camp's atrocities and his own culpability in renewing its prisoners' hopes.