minato sketches
by Sharon White
$22.95
Gigi, an art historian, wants to regain control over her life after her stroke. She leaves her husband and sons in the United States to teach art history for the summer at a university in Tokyo, where she once fell in love. As Gigi explores the unfamiliar landscape in Japan —shimmering temple gardens, a monkey preserve, and a Super Mario go-cart tour — she feels renewed. But when her friendship with Richard, a colleague who abandoned his family years before to teach dance in Japan, becomes an obsession with seeing wild boars in the exclusion zone of the Fukushima Disaster, she discovers her recovery is part of the fabric of loss and rebirth.
Sharon White is the author of several books of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction, including Vanished Gardens: Finding Nature in Philadelphia, winner of the AWP award in creative nonfiction. Her novel, Minato Sketches, won the Rosemary Daniell Prize from Minerva Rising Press. Her latest collection of poetry is The Body is Burden and Delight. Boiling Lake (On Voyage) won the Italo Calvino Prize in Fabulist Fiction. Field Notes, A Geography of Mourning, received the Julia Ward Howe Prize, Honorable Mention, from the Boston Authors Club. Some of her other awards include the Marguerite McGlinn Prize for Fiction from Philadelphia Stories, the Neil Shepard Prize, Green Mountains Review, a Pennsylvania Council on the Arts Fellowship, the Leeway Foundation Award for Achievement, a Colorado Council on the Arts Fellowship, and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. She is an Associate Professor Emerita at Temple University.
“Sharon White’s writing is gorgeous. The sentences are lyrical and assured at the same time. I especially like the descriptions and observations of the natural world—the shimmering rice fields, the wisteria and pink blossoms. Almost every page gives the reader a beautiful image to savor, whether it’s a persimmon or an orchid or something grander, like a park or garden or mountain. minato sketches is an impressive debut.”
— Ann Hood, New York Times best-selling author of The Stolen Child
ISBN: 978-1-950811-23-6
Publication Date: January 2025
Distributor: Ingram Book Company
Number of Pages: 276
Price: $22.95
Binding: Trade paperback
