The book is based on Otsuka's own family history: her grandfather was arrested by the FBI as a suspected spy for Japan the day after Pearl Harbor was bombed, and her mother, uncle and grandmother spent three years in an internment camp in Topaz, Utah. It was a New York Times Notable Book, a San Francisco Chronicle Best Book of the Year, and a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers finalist. Her first novel, When the Emperor Was Divine (2002), is about the internment of a Japanese-American family during World War II.

After studying art as an undergraduate at Yale University she pursued a career as a painter for several years before turning to fiction writing at age 30. Julie Otsuka was born and raised in California. Awards-Guggenheim Fellowship Asian| American Literary Award.Education-B.A., Yale University M.F.A., Columbia University.In language that has the force and the fury of poetry, Julie Otsuka has written a singularly spellbinding novel about the American dream. In eight incantatory sections, The Buddha in the Attic traces their extraordinary lives, from their arduous journey by boat, where they exchange photographs of their husbands, imagining uncertain futures in an unknown land to their arrival in San Francisco and their tremulous first nights as new wives to their backbreaking work picking fruit in the fields and scrubbing the floors of white women to their struggles to master a new language and a new culture to their experiences in childbirth, and then as mothers, raising children who will ultimately reject their heritage and their history to the deracinating arrival of war. Julie Otsuka’s long awaited follow-up to When the Emperor Was Divine (“To watch Emperor catching on with teachers and students in vast numbers is to grasp what must have happened at the outset for novels like Lord of the Flies and To Kill a Mockingbird” - The New York Times) is a tour de force of economy and precision, a novel that tells the story of a group of young women brought over from Japan to San Francisco as ‘picture brides’ nearly a century ago.

The Buddha in the Attic by Julie Otsuka