The Favorites.

Waters, Mary Yukari (author).

Set in Japan in the late 1970s and early 1980s, Waters’ debut novel explores the complex ties between three generations of women in a Japanese family. The two elderly matriarchs, Mrs. Kobayashi and her sister-in-law Mrs. Asaki, have a delicate, politely strained relationship based on a life-altering decision: after the death of her first husband, Mrs. Kobayashi agreed to give her second daughter, Masako, to Mrs. Asaki to raise. Faced with the devastating loss of both her beloved husband and younger child, Mrs. Kobayashi clung to her oldest daughter, Yoko, who grew into a poised, vivacious young woman and went on to marry an American man. Now a mother herself, Yoko brings her 14-year-old daughter, Sarah, to visit her family in Japan during the summer. Sarah then learns the family secret, and observes the carefully constructed walls that have been erected between the family members—walls that will be cracked when a terribly tragedy strikes. Waters, author of the short-story collection The Laws of Evening (2003), is a graceful, subtle writer, gifted at limning the intricate connections between women bound together by blood or marriage. This is a novel of extraordinary beauty.