Fiction. Literature. Historical Fiction. HTML:A Good Morning America Book Club Pick and New York Times Bestseller!
 
From debut author Asha Lemmie, �??a lovely, heartrending story about love and loss, prejudice and pain, and the sometimes dangerous, always durable ties that link a family together.�?� �??Kristin Hannah, #1 New York Times�??bestselling author of The Nightingale

Kyoto, Japan, 1948. �??Do not question. Do not fight. Do not resist.�?�
Such is eight-year-old Noriko �??Nori�?� Kamiza�??s first lesson. She will not question why her mother abandoned her with only these final words. She will not fight her confinement to the attic of her grandparents�?? imperial estate. And she will not resist the scalding chemical baths she receives daily to lighten her skin.
The child of a married Japanese aristocrat and her African American GI lover, Nori is an outsider from birth. Her grandparents take her in, only to conceal her, fearful of a stain on the royal pedigree that they are desperate to uphold in a changing Japan. Obedient to a fault, Nori accepts her solitary life, despite her natural intellect and curiosity. But when chance brings her older half-brother, Akira, to the estate that is his inheritance and destiny, Nori finds in him an unlikely ally with whom she forms a powerful bond�??a bond their formidable grandparents cannot allow and that will irrevocably change the lives they were always meant to lead. Because now that Nori has glimpsed a world in which perhaps there is a place for her after all, she is ready to fight to be a part of it�??a battle that just might cost her everything.
Spanning decades and continents, Fifty Words for Rain is a dazzling epic about the ties that bind, the ties that give you str