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 strength and what it
means to be free.
