An Evening with Jamie Ford: Penguin Random House Book Fair Kick-Off

Tickets include a copy of the 10th Anniversary Edition of Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet.

This event is a partnership between Penguin Random House, Carroll Community College, A Likely Story Bookstore, and Carroll County Public Library. This special author event kicks off the Penguin Random House Book Fair. Click here for full details on the Book Fair.

About the author:

The son of a Chinese American father, JAMIE FORD is the New York Times bestselling author of Love and Other Consolation Prizes, Songs of Willow Frost and Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet, which won the Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature. Having grown up in Seattle, he now lives in Montana with his wife and children.

About the book:

In 1986, Henry Lee joins a crowd outside the Panama Hotel, once the gateway to Seattle’s Japantown. It has been boarded up for decades, but now the new owner has discovered the belongings of Japanese families who were sent to internment camps during World War II. As the owner displays and unfurls a Japanese parasol, Henry, a Chinese American, remembers a young Japanese American girl from his childhood in the 1940s—Keiko Okabe, with whom he forged a bond of friendship and innocent love that transcended the prejudices of their Old World ancestors. After Keiko and her family were evacuated to the internment camps, she and Henry could only hope that their promise to each other would be kept. Now, forty years later, Henry explores the hotel’s basement for the Okabe family’s belongings and for a long-lost object whose value he cannot even begin to measure. His search will take him on a journey to revisit the sacrifices he has made for family, for love, for country.