Author Robert Kono finished writing East Falls the Sun shortly before he died in 2023, aged 90. His fascinating historical novel traces the lives of the Kurobes, a Japanese American family incarcerated in concentration camps after Japan attacked Pearl Harbor in December 1941. Alan Kurobe is nine years old when he is first shipped to a camp in Wyoming. When his mother falls ill, he and his two younger sisters are transferred to another camp in Texas to join their Japanese-born father, who has no interest in them. Family dysfunction, institutional racism and a permanent identity crisis plague Alan for four years in the camps before the family is forcibly “repatriated” to Japan at the insistence of their father. They survive for another 13 years in a devastated, disease-ridden, defeated foreign country before they are finally allowed to return home. A story of resilience, adaptation and eventual personal triumph, based on the author’s real-life experiences. Due spring 2024.
Baby Zero, Pierre Ouellette’s next near-future thriller, takes us to the verge of human extinction. At the Center for Disease Control, young statistician Stacy Pallas is assigned to investigate reports of a sharp decline in new pregnancies. She inadvertently discovers the ultimate threat to the human race. Scientists reveal that a polluting “forever chemical” has activated a dormant retrovirus that is blocking natural fertilization. Global births are rapidly heading toward zero. Facing extinction, humanity’s only hope is the store of frozen eggs at IVF clinics. A colleague of Stacy’s sells the data to a corrupt private equity firm buying up IVF assets – with deadly results. When the looming catastrophe leaks to the media, all hell breaks loose. Violence erupts at a corporate egg bank in Montana, where armed groups converge – paramilitary security protecting corporate assets, fast-growing militias with fickle loyalties, a religious cult welcoming the End of Days, not to mention the local police, FBI and Homeland Security. Stacy teams up with Gavin Gray, a journalist working on the story, and together they navigate the bloodshed and chaos to emerge in a very different world, each with a deeply personal stake in a tentative future. Due out spring 2024.
A new personal memoir about Zina Rachevsky, the international socialite and film actress, of distant Tsarist lineage, who gave it all up in 1968 to seek enlightenment with a Buddhist master. Cossetted by wealth and privilege from birth, appearing in a dozen movies in the 1950s, she regularly made headlines with her wild adventures as Princess Zina, Hollywood starlet. After marrying briefly at 18, she became Countess d’Harcourt, before later meeting and marrying film director Conrad Rooks. This first-hand account by a writer who spent time with her tells the story of her final (earthly) incarnation as Anila Thubten Chang Chub Palmo, a Gelug Tibetan Buddhist nun who took vows from Trijang Rinpoche in Dharamsala, India. Zina died after a short illness in 1973, aged 42, in a spartan room in a monastery in Nepal.
