Clara Kumagai

Clara Kumagai burst on the YA scene last year with the popular Catfish Rolling, a 2024 Yoto Carnegie Medal nominee. Now she’s back, with restless ghosts to be appeased in her new novel, inspired by Puccini’s Madame Butterfly. When Japanese-American teenager Adam discovers a diary in his attic, he is enthralled by its account of a young Japanese woman’s life. A hundred years separate them yet she, like Adam, is caught between cultures, relationships and heartbreak. She also writes of the ghosts that have begun to seek her out, which Adam dismisses as fantasy – until he too, begins to be haunted. It leads him to Nagasaki, trying to solve the mystery of the diary, and his own identity. And the ghosts gather…

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