Diplomat's Daughter

The Diplomat's Daughter follows Emi Kato, the daughter of a Japanese diplomat, through the years following the bombing of Pearl Harbor. Interned at a family camp in Texas alongside German and Japanese Americans classified as enemy aliens, she forms a bond with Christian Lange, whose German-born parents were arrested on suspicion of disloyalty.

The novel moves between three characters and three fronts of the war: Christian, who enlists in the US Army and is sent toward the Pacific theater; Emi, repatriated with her mother to Japan and later sheltering in a resort town used by both Jewish and Nazi refugees; and Leo Hartmann, the Viennese friend and first love from whom she was separated when his family fled Austria, now surviving in occupied Shanghai.

Drawing on internment history that is less widely documented than the Japanese American camp experience, the novel follows its three leads as the war pushes them toward each other again.