When Mikan Road Was Ours

Winner of Simon & Schuster’s Books Like Us contest, a gripping, sincere debut novel set across four generations of a Japanese American family living in California’s vibrant agricultural heartlands, exploring the sharp edges of inheritance and what it means to truly belong.

Amid a sweltering Los Angeles heat wave, Murano, a reclusive high school English teacher, is muddling through life. Reeling from his father’s sudden death as well as his own recent cancer diagnosis, he passes time hazily grading papers and appeasing disgruntled parents while counting down each day until summer vacation. The monotony breaks when he inherits his great-uncle Benjiro’s unpublished memoir. What Murano expects to be a grim reminder of his position as the half-white son of the family’s outcast instead whisks him away to 1930s California, to a time when the Murano family was inseparable, relishing life together on their bucolic farm.

As the memoir introduces him to relatives he never knew existed and unearths hidden complexities of the past, Murano is pulled close to the Japanese identity he’s dismissed all of his life. Faced with the reality of his family’s dissolution, Murano becomes determined to understand its breaking point following their incarceration in American concentration camps during World War II, no matter what hidden truths he might uncover about his ancestors or himself.

Lovingly crafted with poignant and profound attention to historical detail, When Mikan Road Was Ours is a rich meditation on belonging that seamlessly blends the intricacies of heritage, the resilience of family bonds, and the struggle to reconcile a past filled with both heartache and hope.