Book Recommendation: Snow Falling on Cedars by David Guterson
Snow Falling on Cedars (1995) by David Guterson is an excellent novel and easy to recommend for your reading list. Click on the links to learn more about the author and this book.
David Guterson was born in Seattle on May 4, 1956. He was educated at the University of Washington, where he graduated summa cum laude as an English major in 1978, and where he received his Master's degree in Creative Writing in 1982 and his Teaching Certificate in 1983.
During his university years, Guterson worked in restaurant kitchens and for the U.S. Forest Service. In 1984, he began teaching high school English on Bainbridge Island in Washington State. Simultaneously he began to work as a freelance journalist and became a contributing editor to Harper's magazine.
Guterson's many awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship, the White Award for Journalism, the Washington State Governor's Writers Award, the Swedish Academy Crime Writers' Award, the American Booksellers Association Book of the Year Award, the Barnes & Noble Discover Award, and the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction for Snow Falling on Cedars.
Guterson is the co-founder of Field's End, a writer's community, and in 1998 established the David Guterson Award for MFA students in Creative Writing at the University of Washington. He is currently the author of 11 books of fiction, non-fiction, and poetry and lives on Bainbridge Island, in Washington State.
Goodreads Review of Snow Falling on Cedars
Gripping, tragic, and densely atmospheric—a masterpiece of suspense 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, 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.
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