Global Perspectives is a group devoted to exploring history and looking at diverse perspectives through fiction.  The program is held monthly on the 2nd Wednesday of the month from February-October 2026 at 6pm in the Carnegie Library meeting room. We alternate between discussing a book one month to viewing a movie the next month throughout the series. Be sure to email arobertson@munpl.org if you would like to join our email list.

This Month's Book:

This month, we will read When the Emperor Was Divine by Julie Otsuka, a novel set in America during World War II (1939-1945).

Synopsis from Goodreads:

Julie Otsuka's commanding debut novel paints a portrait of the Japanese internment camps unlike any we have ever seen. With crystalline intensity and precision, Otsuka uses a single family to evoke the deracination "both physical and emotional" of a generation of Japanese Americans.

In five chapters, each flawlessly executed from a different point of view "the mother receiving the order to evacuate; the daughter on the long train ride to the camp; the son in the desert encampment; the family's return to their home; and the bitter release of the father after more than four years in captivity" she has created a small tour de force, a novel of unrelenting economy and suppressed emotion.

Spare, intimate, arrestingly understated, When the Emperor Was Divine is a haunting evocation of a family in wartime and an unmistakably resonant lesson for our times. It heralds the arrival of a singularly gifted new novelist.