Alan Brennert

Softcover, 301 pp.

Alan Brennert’s beloved novel Moloka’i, currently has over 600,000 copies in print. This companion tale tells the story of Ruth, the daughter that Rachel Kalama ― quarantined for most of her life at the isolated leprosy settlement of Kalaupapa ― was forced to give up at birth.

The book follows young Ruth from her arrival at the Kapiʻolani Home for Girls in Honolulu, to her adoption by a Japanese couple who raise her on a strawberry and grape farm in California, her marriage and unjust internment at Manzanar Relocation Camp during World War II―and then, after the war, to the life-altering day when she receives a letter from a woman who says she is Ruth’s birth mother, Rachel.