2010 Reading Together Selection Announced

Community selection committee chooses

David Guterson’s Snow Falling on Cedars

Kalamazoo Public Library, 315 S. Rose St., announces the selection of David Guterson’s New York Times best-seller Snow Falling on Cedars for the 2010 Reading Together program.

Reading Together book discussions and a wide variety of special events will take place in March and April of 2010. Author David Guterson will visit Kalamazoo on April 14, 2010, during National Library Week to conclude Reading Together.

About Snow Falling on Cedars

A phenomenal West Coast bestseller, winner of a 1995 Pacific Northwest Booksellers Award, the 1995 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, and the 1996 American Booksellers Association Book of the Year Award, the enthralling novel Snow Falling on Cedars is at once a murder mystery, a courtroom drama, the story of a doomed love affair, and a stirring meditation on place, prejudice, and justice.

San Piedro Island, north of Puget Sound, is a place so isolated that no one who lives there can afford to make enemies. But in 1954 a local fisherman is found suspiciously drowned, and a Japanese American named Kabuo Miyamoto is charged with his murder. In the course of the ensuing trial, it becomes clear that what is at stake is more than a man’s guilt. For on San Pedro, memory grows as thickly as cedar trees and the fields of ripe strawberries—memories of a charmed love affair between a white boy and the Japanese girl who grew up to become Kabuo’s wife; memories of land desired, paid for, and lost. Above all, San Piedro is haunted by the memory of what happened to its Japanese residents during World War II, when an entire community was sent into exile while its neighbors watched. Gripping, tragic, and densely atmospheric, Snow Falling on Cedars is a masterpiece of suspense—one that leaves us shaken and changed. —Random House

“Haunting.... A whodunit complete with courtroom maneuvering and surprising turns of evidence and at the same time a mystery, something altogether richer and deeper.” —Los Angeles Times

“Luminous . . . a beautifully assured and full-bodied novel [that] becomes a tender examination of fairness and forgiveness . . . Guterson has fashioned something haunting and true.” —Time Magazine

“Compelling...heartstopping. Finely wrought, flawlessly written.” —The New York Times Book Review