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John Burnham Schwartz's most recent novel is THE COMMONER.
Read about the book here.
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Listen to John's interview with Scott Simon on NPR's Weekend Edition.
"[An] impressively imagined and often exquisite act of ventriloquism.... [Schwartz is] unusually sensitive to the Japanese habits of reticence and indirection....As in a Japanese room, nothing is out of place and no detail is accidental in this book. One of Schwartz's achievements is to take us into corridors and rituals that have almost never been revealed to the public.... What is singular and most striking about The Commoner is how deeply and authoritatively it inhabits the mind and the sensibility of a young Japanese woman."
—Pico Iyer, The New York Review of Books
"Stephen Frear's film "The Queen" attempted to imagine what goes on
inside the British monarch's head. In his new novel, The Commoner,
John Burnham Schwartz takes a similar—and equally sympathetic—
approach to the empress of Japan.... Out of this heart-wrenching
history, Schwartz has woven a delicate, elegiac tale, intensely moving
and utterly convincing. He has imaginatively reconstructed the private
story while remaining largely true to the scant details that have been
reported to the public.... It's magical to have the curtain
imaginatively lifted on these mysteries."
—The New York Times Book Review
"Schwartz has written a mesmerizing novel full of tenderness and compassion,
one that convincingly invests the Japanese empress's voice with all the
nuance it demands."
—The Washington Post
"John Burnham Schwartz is a keen observer of Japan.... He has written a novel that attempts to give these silenced women (the empress and crown princess) their voices back.... Schwartz handles the physical details effortlessly, but his silken style lends itself best to the creation of internal life from whole cloth. You can sternly remind yourself every few pages that this is fiction, or you can relax and enjoy the fantasy that you are privy to two of the most private public lives in the world."
—Los Angeles Times
"The Commoner is an artful meditation on the limits of love and duty. No happy endings here, but with a spare prose style that perfectly mirrors its setting, this novel will thrill readers who crave literary romance."
—People
Read more praise here.
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