A young mother fights impossible odds to be reunited with her child in this acutely insightful first novel about an intercultural marriage gone terribly wrong.

Jill Parker is an American painter living in Japan. Far from the trendy gaijin neighborhoods of downtown Tokyo, she’s settled in a remote seaside village where she makes ends meet as a bar hostess. Her world appears to open when she meets Yusuke, a savvy and sensitive art gallery owner who believes in her talent. But their love affair, and subsequent marriage, is doomed to a life of domestic hell, for Yusuke is the chonan, the eldest son, who assumes the role of rigid patriarch in his traditional family while Jill’s duty is that of a servile Japanese wife. A daily battle of wills ensues as Jill resists instruction in the proper womanly arts. Even the long-anticipated birth of a son, Kei, fails to unite them. Divorce is the only way out, but in Japan a foreigner has no rights to custody, and Jill must choose between freedom and abandoning her child.

Told with tenderness, humor, and an insider’s knowledge of contemporary Japan, Losing Kei is the debut novel of an exceptional expatriate voice.

Suzanne Kamata's work has appeared in over one hundred publications. She is the editor of The Broken Bridge: Fiction from Expatriates in Literary Japan and a forthcoming anthology from Beacon Press on parenting children with disabilities. A five-time nominee for the Pushcart Prize, she has twice won the Nippon Airways/Wingspan Fiction Contest.

Praise for Mary Malloy's The Wandering Heart:

"An impressive fiction debut. . . . Malloy mixes history and fantasy with flair and delivers a wonderfully satisfying puzzler."—Publishers Weekly

"A fabulous thriller. . . . A modern psychological tale with strong implications of horror."—MBR The Bookwatch

"Mystery à la Gothic. . . . Historian Malloy does her research proud."—Mystery Scene

The second book in the Lizzie Manning trilogy. Following the path of a medieval pilgrimage, historian Lizzie Manning finds unexpected danger. Chaucer may have based his Wife of Bath on a real woman, whose descendant holds certain artifacts, but will the investigation lead to something more sinister? Are the bones of St. Thomas Becket, believed to have been destroyed nearly six hundred years ago, hidden in Canterbury Cathedral, and is someone willing to kill to protect the secret?

Mary Malloy is the author of four maritime history books, including Devil on the Deep Blue Sea, which won the 2006 John Lyman Book Award for best maritime biography. Her first historical mystery The Wandering Heart introduced historian Lizzie Manning. Malloy has a PhD from Brown University and teaches maritime history at the Sea Education Association in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, and Museum Studies at Harvard University.

Praise for Mary Malloy’s work:

“A tour de force—fascinating, highly readable, and meticulously researched.”—Nathaniel Philbrick

“Meticulously researched and engagingly written.”—Seattle Times

“In the tradition of Byatt’s Possession, Malloy’s debut novel is a complex and masterfully woven tale that will keep readers up far into the night.”—Caroline Preston, author of Jackie by Josie and Gatsby’s Girl

Historian Lizzie Manning didn’t set out to become a sleuth, and she had no intention of becoming personally involved in a medieval mystery. Her expertise lay in eighteenth-century maritime voyages, and her assignment was to find a Tlingit Indian corpse robbed from its grave two hundred years ago during Captain Cook’s Pacific voyage. First accident, then compulsion, pull her deeper into the past, through thirty generations of one British family. Lizzie’s sources aren’t fingerprints and firearms, but documents, artifacts, paintings, architecture, and even the landscape—though modern forensic science helps clarify what happened to a few ancient corpses. Lizzie’s work takes on personal meaning as she is drawn into her own family’s history of insanity and a search for a Crusader’s disembodied heart.

As with Elizabeth Peters’ Amelia Peabody and Amanda Cross’ Kate Fansler, Mary Malloy creates a heroine who is a respected scholar in her field, and who draws on her expertise to solve the mysteries that come her way.

Mary Malloy, PhD, is the author of four maritime history books. She is a professor of maritime history at Sea Education Association in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, and of museum studies at Harvard University.