During the war, Jim and Grania’s letters both real and imagined attempt to sustain their intimacy, even while they are both pulled into cataclysmic events that will alter the world forever. But two weeks after their wedding, Jim must leave to serve as a stretcher bearer on the blood soaked battlefields of Flanders. In wonderment the two begin to create a new emotional vocabulary that encompas*ses both sound and silence. After graduation Grania stays on to work at the school, and it is there that she meets Jim Lloyd, a hearing man. But when it becomes clear that Grania can no longer thrive in the world of the hearing, her family sends her to live at the Ontario School for the Deaf where she learns sign language and speech. Her mother cannot accept her daughter’s deafness, so Grania’s indefatigable grandmother tries to teach her language from the inside out. At the age of five, Grania the daughter of hardworking hoteliers in small town Ontario emerges from a bout of scarlet fever profoundly deaf, and is suddenly sealed off from the world that was just beginning to open for her. With his wife’s persuasive voice in his head and the echo of their love in his heart, Bin embarks on an unforgettable journey into his past that will throw light on a dark time in history.Deafening is a tale of remarkable virtuosity and power. Both running from grief and driving straight toward it, Bin must ask himself whether he truly wants to find First Father, the man who made a fateful decision that almost destroyed his family all those years ago. More than fifty years later, after his wife’s sudden death, Bin travels across Canada to find the biological father who has been lost to him. Removed from the one-hundred-mile “Protected Zone,” Japanese Canadians were sent to internment camps where for five years they lived in hardship in hastily erected shacks in the mountainous interior. Families were allowed to take only the possessions they could carry, and Bin, as a young boy, witnessed neighbors raiding his home before the transport boat even undocked. In her new novel, she traces the lives, loves, and secrets in one Japanese-Canadian family caught in the larger arc of history during the 1940s.Īfter the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, the Canadian government uprooted Bin Okuma’s family and relatives from their homes on British Columbia’s west coast. Frances Itani, author of the internationally bestselling novel Deafening and an extraordinary researcher and scholar of detail, excels at weaving breathtaking fiction from true-life events.

Requiem by frances itani