> Skip to content
[]
  • Published: 15 May 2012
  • ISBN: 9780385340953
  • Imprint: Random House US Group
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 384
  • RRP: $45.00
Categories:

Butterfly's Child

A Novel




"The kind of book you sink into, becoming so transfixed by the story that you cannot help devouring it in just a few sittings" (Charlotte Observer), this enthralling novel imagines the story of what happens after the conclusion of Puccini's Madama Butterfly, the world's most popular opera.

When three-year-old Benji is plucked from the security of his home in Nagasaki to live with his American father, Lt. Benjamin Franklin Pinkerton, and stepmother, Kate, on their farm in Illinois, the family conceals Benji’s true identity as a child born from a liaison between an officer and a geisha—and instead tells everyone that he is an orphan. When the truth surfaces, it will splinter this family’s fragile dynamic and send Benji on the journey of a lifetime from Illinois to the Japanese settlements in Denver and San Francisco, then across the ocean to Nagasaki, where he will uncover the truth about his mother’s tragic death.

Don’t miss the exclusive conversation between Angela Davis-Gardner and Jennifer Egan at the back of the book.

  • Published: 15 May 2012
  • ISBN: 9780385340953
  • Imprint: Random House US Group
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 384
  • RRP: $45.00
Categories:

Praise for Butterfly's Child

  • "Demands to be read in one sitting...as unexpected as it is revealing."--Atlanta Journal Constitution
  • "Book club alert:...a highly readable sequel to the tragic opera that works within the characters' existing framework while still managing to sneak in a few surprises." --Christian Science Monitor
  • "Richly imagined...In its way, it holds its own alongside the modern Western masterpieces of Larry McMurtry and Cormac McCarthy....It strikes themes of hope and renewal, and believing in the unbelievable." --Kirkus Reviews
  • "Immediately engaging...Though Davis-Gardner inherited her characters, they are complex, dimensional beings in her hands." --Publishers Weekly
  • "Extraordinary...With deft imagination, and prose as delicately suggestive as the design on a kimono, Angela Davis-Gardner spins a provocative and persuasive account of what transpires after the curtain falls."--Opera News