In 1948, a nineteen-year-old pearl diver's dreams of spending her life combing the waters of Japan's Inland Sea are shattered when she discovers she has leprosy. By law, she is exiled to an island leprosarium, where she is stripped of her dignity and instructed to forget her past. Her name is erased from her family records, and she is forced to select a new one. To the two thousand patients on the island of Nagashima, she becomes Miss Fuji. Although drugs arrest the course of Miss Fuji's disease, she cannot leave the colony. Instead, she becomes a caretaker to the other patients, and through the example of their courage, she gains insight into the deep wellspring of strength she will need to reclaim her freedom. Written with precision and eloquence, The Pearl Diver is a dazzling meditation on isolation and community, cruelty and compassion.
About the Author :
Jeff Talarigo received the American Academy of Arts and Letters' Rosenthal Award for The Pearl Diver. He is currently a fellow at the New York Public Library's Cullman Centre for Scholars and Writers and lives in New York City.
Jennifer Ikeda has been narrating audiobooks since 2002. Among her readings are When My Name Was Keoko by Linda Sue Park; Just Listen by Sarah Dessen; and After the Wreck, I Picked Myself Up, Spread My Wings, and Flew Away by Joyce Carol Oates. She has won six AudioFile Earphones Awards.
Review :
"Absorbing and original. Talarigo has managed to create a tone and mood that are themselves expressions of a time and a place and a people. The resulting light radiates outward from one small society in postwar Japan--across the waters and the years--to where the reader sits, still deeply immersed after the last page has been turned."
-- "John Burnham Schwartz, author of Reservation Road"
"An unforgettable, achingly sad novel."
-- "Booklist"
"At once exquisite and horrifying, a piece of delicacy forged out of pain and the struggle against numbness...There is no denying the loveliness of this book...In Miss Fuji, [Talarigo] has given us a genuine hero."
-- "Minneapolis Star-Tribune"
"Drawing from actual medical history, Talarigo succeeds in telling a compelling story whose strength is its elegant simplicity."
-- "Publishers Weekly"
"Hypnotic...Talarigo's prose is as evocative as a Hokusai woodcut."
-- "Los Angeles Times"
"Luminous...Everything looks magical through [Talarigo's] lens."
-- "Baltimore Sun"
"One of the most honest, tender, and inventive books I've read in years. Talarigo never steps out of culture, out of voice, out of place; and yet this is a universal story, one of love, one of neglect, one of shame...He can find redemption even in the narrowest corridors of the human spirit."
-- "Colum McCann, author of Dancer"
"Quietly powerful...This is a lyrically told tale of ugliness redeemed and lives changed by small acts with large consequences."
-- "Liza Dalby, author of Gisha"
"Transformative...Explores the question of what a person becomes after having been stripped of everything: name, family and function, privacy and freedom. Talarigo's answer seems to be that we are saved not by what we are but by who we are, the part of us that exists within the flesh, that is capable of transcendence."
-- "San Francisco Chronicle"
