Mark Sakamoto

Two grandparents on opposite sides of the same war meet in Mark Sakamoto's family. Ralph MacLean left the Magdalen Islands to enlist, was captured at Hong Kong in December 1941 and spent nearly four years in Japanese prison camps. Mitsue Sakamoto was a Japanese Canadian in Vancouver whose family lost its home and business when the government moved them inland and put them to work on an Alberta beet farm. Their children married. Forgiveness, published by HarperCollins Canada in 2014, sets the two histories against each other and then against the author's own account of his mother's drinking and death. It won Canada Reads in 2018 after Jeanne Beker defended it. Sakamoto trained as a lawyer, has worked in media and in Ottawa, and lives in Toronto.