Comfort Woman A Novel

'On the fifth anniversary of my father's death, my mother confessed to his murder.' In her stunning literary debut, Nora Okja Keller tells the hidden story of Akiko - sold into sexual slavery as a 'comfort woman' during World War II - and her American-born daughter, Beccah, unaware of her mother's history until after Akiko's death. Narrated in two voices, Beccah's and Akiko's, Comfort Woman skilfully moves between the Asian past and the American present. Set against the gradual revelations of atrocities in the Japanese 'recreation camps' and Akiko's subsequent suffocating marriage to a missionary, the reader is drawn into Beccah's struggles with the Korean traditions that alienate her form her American peers. Comfort Woman is a novel both brutally vivid and eloquently lyrical. It is a story of war, suffering and adolescent angst. Keller deftly, at times humorously, explores the complications caused by clashes of culture and generations. Yet at its heart it is a story of survival and the inescapable bond between a mother and her daughter.