by Julie Otsuka
First published 2022
Alice finds sanctuary in her daily swimming routine at the local pool. The water offers structure against her failing memory and connects her to other regular swimmers through shared lanes and unspoken rituals. When a crack appears in the pool bottom, the facility closes indefinitely. Cast out from their aquatic refuge, the swimmers scatter into an uncertain world. For Alice, losing the pool means losing her final anchor. Without her daily laps, she plunges into confusion and chaos. Her dementia accelerates as she becomes swept into vivid memories of her childhood and the Japanese internment camp where she spent the war years. Her daughter watches this devastating decline unfold, narrating Alice's journey from the safety of routine into the wilderness of a mind that can no longer hold onto the present. The story explores the fragile bonds between mothers and daughters when memory fails and the past becomes more real than today.
Genres: literary-fiction, mental-illness, contemporary, family-drama
Vibes: emotional, intimate, thought-provoking
Tropes: family-secrets, unreliable-narrator
Setting: Japan, United States
Period: 20th-century, World War II
176 pages · Hardcover · Knopf
Content warnings: mental-illness