This is the kind of book where you can smell and hear and see the fictional world the writer has created, so palpably does the atmosphere come through. Set on an island in the straits north of Puget Sound, in Washington, where everyone is either a fisherman or a berry farmer, the story is nominally about a murder trial. But since it's set in the 1950s, lingering memories of World War II, internment camps and racism helps fuel suspicion of a Japanese-American fisherman, a lifelong resident of the islands. It's a great story, but the primary pleasure of the book is Guterson's renderings of the people and the place.

Amazon.com Audiobook Review
Ishmael Chambers, the one-man staff of the newspaper on San Piedro Island in Puget Sound, is covering the 1954 trial of a high school classmate accused of killing another classmate over a land dispute. Actor Peter Marinker--a stage veteran who has appeared in such movies as The Russia House and The Emerald Forest--takes us deep inside the world created by David Guterson in his award-winning 1994 novel. We learn the sensory details of life in a small fishing community; the emotional lives of people scarred inside and out by World War II; and the deep and unresolved prejudices toward the island's Japanese Americans, who were interned during the war--a tragedy that led to financial advantage for some islanders. Marinker deliberately but nimbly moves from the characters' distinctive voices to the poignant interior perspectives of the soulful, wounded Chambers as he tells a combination love story, murder mystery, and painful history lesson. (Running time: 15 hours, 10 cassettes) --Lou Schuler

From Publishers Weekly
First-novelist Guterson presents a multilayered courtroom drama set in the aftermath of the internment of Japanese-Americans during WWII. Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
Japanese American Kabuo Miyomoto is arrested in 1954 for the murder of a fellow fisherman, Carl Heine. Miyomoto's trial, which provides a focal point to the novel, stirs memories of past relationships and events in the minds and hearts of the San Piedro Islanders. Through these memories, Guterson illuminates the grief of loss, the sting of prejudice triggered by World War II, and the imperatives of conscience. With mesmerizing clarity he conveys the voices of Kabuo's wife, Hatsue, and Ishmael Chambers, Hatsue's first love who, having suffered the loss of her love and the ravages of war, ages into a cynical journalist now covering Kabuo's trial. The novel poetically evokes the beauty of the land while revealing the harshness of war, the nuances of our legal system, and the injustice done to those interned in U.S. relocation camps. Highly recommended for all fiction collections.Sheila Riley, Smith- sonian Inst. Libs., Washington, D.C.Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

New York Times Book Review
"Compelling . . . heart-stopping. Finely wrought, flawlessly written."

Citation by The New York Times as a Notable Book for 1994
"A handsomely constructed, densely packed first novel whose characters are those who suffered and those who profited from the internment of Japanese-Americans in World War II, called upon by a criminal trial to act decently later on."-

From AudioFile
B.D. Wong's romanticized reading fails to catch much of the power and subtlety of Guterson's prose. R.F.W. (c)AudioFile, Portland, Maine

From Booklist
A 1954 murder trial in an island community off the coast of Washington state broadens into an exploration of war, race, and the mysteries of human motivation. The dead man, Carl Heine, his accused murderer, Kabuo Miyomoto, and the one-man staff of the local newspaper, Ishmael Chambers, were all scarred by their experiences in World War II but resumed normal-seeming lives upon their return to the fishing and strawberry-farming community of San Piedro in Puget Sound. While fishermen Heine and Miyomoto set about raising families, the newspaperman remains alone and apart, alienated by the loss of an arm and a childhood love, who married Miyomoto. Chambers comes upon information that could alter the verdict of the trial if presented or change his own life if suppressed, creating a private trial as momentous as the public one, with the outcome as much in doubt. Guterson's first novel is compellingly suspenseful on each of its several levels. Dennis Dodge

From Kirkus Reviews
Old passions, prejudices, and grudges surface in a Washington State island town when a Japanese man stands trial for the murder of a fisherman in the 1950s. Guterson (The Country Ahead of Us, the Country Behind, 1989, etc.) has written a thoughtful, poetic first novel, a cleverly constructed courtroom drama with detailed, compelling characters. Many years earlier, Kabuo Miyamoto's family had made all but the last payment on seven acres of land they were in the process of buying from the Heine family. Then the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, and Kabuo's family was interned. Etta Heine, Carl's mother, called off the deal. Kabuo served in the war, returned, and wanted his land back. After changing hands a few times, the land ended up with Carl Heine. When Carl, a fisherman, is found drowned in his own net, all the circumstantial evidence, with the land dispute as a possible motive, points to Kabuo as the murderer. Meanwhile, Hatsue Miyamoto, Kabuo's wife, is the undying passion of Ishmael Chambers, the publisher and editor of the town newspaper. Ishmael, who returned from the war minus an arm, can't shake his obsession for Hatsue any more than he can ignore the ghost pains in his nonexistent arm. As a thick snowstorm whirls outside the courtroom, the story is unburied. The same incidents are recounted a number of times, with each telling revealing new facts. In the end, justice and morality are proven to be intimately woven with beauty--the kind of awe and wonder that children feel for the world. But Guterson communicates these truths through detail, not philosophical argument: Readers will come away with a surprising store of knowledge regarding gill-netting boats and other specifics of life in the Pacific Northwest. Packed with lovely moments and as compact as haiku--at the same time, a page-turner full of twists. (Author tour) -- Copyright ©1994, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

FROM OUR EDITORS

Guterson weaves his story around the trial of Kabuo Miyamoto, a Japanese American, who is accused of murdering a fellow fisherman and childhood friend, Carl Heine, at sea. The facts are stacked against Kabuo, especially as it becomes common knowledge that there is a long-standing dispute over land which began with Kabuo's and Carl's parents.

Promises were made and broken over this land (among other things) with the advent of World War II. The Japanese families in the community were sent to internment camps. "The fisherman felt, like most islanders, that this exiling of the Japanese was the right thing to do￯﾿ﾽ and that the Japanese must go for reasons that made sense: there was a war on and that changed everything." This sentiment remains as men returned from the war carrying with them the horrors they experienced -- such as how they had to kill the enemy: those with Japanese faces. Kabuo's family's land had been sold while they were in the internment camp and Kabuo had been fighting in the war. Limbs, lives, and hope were lost and a quiet bitterness settled on the island. The men retreated to the ocean to fish for salmon, they worked their strawberry fields, they came home to their wives - in these places they remained silent and steadfast. There were chores to be done, children to be raised, and people and pasts best left alone.

But with the advent of Carl Heine's death, the past rears its ugly head as people come to the witness stand to testify with their stories of land disputes, promises broken, accusations, and lies. This conjures up bitter memories in particular for the town newspaperman, Ishmael Chambers, who is still in love with Kabuo's wife, Hatsue, a woman he was secretly involved with during his youth, a woman he should have never been in love with because she was Japanese. She ended things with him with in a letter from the internment camp: "When we met that last time in the cedar tree and I felt your body move against mine, I knew with certainty that everything was wrong....This is the last time I will write to you. I am not yours anymore." This lost love haunts Ishmael through the war in which he fights and in which he loses an arm. When he returns to San Piedro, Hatsue is married to Kabuo.

As the story progresses it becomes clear just how intertwined the lives of these people are, even as they live and work in isolation. Guterson masterfully brings out his characters through their silence and the vast, lonely landscape of the island. The plot twists and turns unexpectedly as people step out of the background and are forced to make choices that will affect not only their own lives, but those of others as well. In the end the mystery and dignity of the people and their island remain, as Ishmael Chambers aptly conveys when he reflects in his writings that "The heart of any other, because it had a will, would remain forever mysterious."

-- Jen Forman

ANNOTATION

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.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

On San Piedro, an island of rugged, spectacular beauty in Puget Sound, a Japanese-American fisherman stands trial for murder. Set in 1954 in the shadow of World War II, 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.

SYNOPSIS

Celebrating the upcoming motion picture from Universal Pictures starring Ethan Hawke and directed by Scott Hicks (Shine) is a special hardcover edition of the international bestseller.

FROM THE CRITICS

Publishers Weekly

First-novelist Guterson presents a multilayered courtroom drama set in the aftermath of the internment of Japanese-Americans during WWII. (Oct.)

AudioFile