Snow Falling on Cedars (Guterson)

Snow Falling on Cedars 
David Gutersonn, 1994
Knopf Doubleday
460 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780679764021


Summary 
Winner of the 1995 Pen/Faulkner Award

In 1954 a fisherman from San Piedro Island in Puget Sound is found suspiciously drowned, and a Japanese-American is charged with his murder. The trial is haunted by memories of what happened to the Japanese residents during World War II when the entire community was sent into exile.

Snow Falling on Cedars is a beautifully crafted courtroom drama, love story, and war novel, illuminating the psychology of a community, the ambiguities of justice, the racism that persists even between neighbors, and the necessity of individual moral action despite the indifference of nature and circumstance. (From the publisher.)