Why did Barbara love this book?
I heard of this book from a neighbor, and now I’m telling everyone to read it.
This is a historical fiction set in California, where I live, and it has wonderful, diverse, complex characters. A family saga infused with the landscape of the Eastern Sierras and its water wars, the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the WWII internment of Japanese Americans, and gourmet French cuisine.
The book had amazing prose that took my breath away on every page. This novel prompted me to travel to the museum at Manzanar, the former Japanese internment camp, which is well worth visiting.
The story of how this book came to completion is amazing, too: the author had a major stroke when it was almost finished, leaving her daughter to painstakingly help her find her voice again, a process that took six years. Worth every moment I spent immersed in its 500+ pages.
1 author picked Properties of Thirst as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.
A National Bestseller
A New Yorker Best Book of 2022
Fifteen years after the publication of Evidence of Things Unseen, National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize finalist Marianne Wiggins returns with a "big, bold book" (USA TODAY) destined to be an American classic: a sweeping masterwork set during World War II about the meaning of family and the limitations of the American Dream.
Rockwell "Rocky" Rhodes has spent years fiercely protecting his California ranch from the LA Water Corporation. It is here where he and his beloved wife Lou raised their twins, Sunny and Stryker, and it is here where…