Ana Johns

Ana Johns spent more than twenty years in the creative arts, as a creative director and as a business owner, before her first novel. The Woman in the White Kimono (Park Row, 2019) grew out of a story her father told her about his time in the US Navy in post-war Japan: he loved a Japanese girl, learned the etiquette of the tea ceremony and practised his Japanese after her family invited him to tea, and was refused as a suitor when they saw that he was an American sailor. The book runs on two clocks, Japan in 1957, where Naoko Nakamura's arranged match falls apart when her family learns she is carrying an American sailor's child, and the present day, where a daughter goes looking for what became of her. Johns was raised in metro Detroit. Her novel was picked for the BBC Radio 2 Book Club and has appeared in translation in more than twenty languages.