Cali-born author Julie Otsuka draws from her own family's experiences to inform her writing, which often focuses on Japanese and Japanese American history—her grandfather was arrested as a suspected Japanese spy after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, and her mother, uncle, and grandmother spent three years in a prison camp in Utah. After penning her award-winning Japanese historical novels When the Emperor Was Divine and The Buddha in the Attic, Otsuka took a ten-year break, only to return and blow us all out of the water with the "propulsive and lyrical" (Rebecca Makkai) novel The Swimmers last year. The book follows a group of obsessive swimmers whose routine is rocked by the appearance of a crack in their pool. One of the swimmers is Alice, whose experience of dementia is made more chaotic by stark memories of her childhood in a World War II-era internment camp. by Lindsay Costello