The electrical field

by Kerri Sakamoto

When the beautiful Chisako and her lover are found murdered in a park in the 1970s, members of a small Ontario suburb must finally acknowledge certain inescapable truths about each other and the way their community has been shaped by the dark shadow of World War II internment camps. With all the suspense of a psychological thriller, The Electrical Field slowly exposes all those implicated in the murders - particularly Miss Saito, the novel's unreliable narrator, through whom we gradually discover the truth. Miss Saito, middle-aged, caring for her elderly bed-ridden father and her distracted younger brother, on the surface seems to be a passive observer. But her own disturbed past and her craving for an emotional connection will prove to have profound consequences. Kerri Sakamoto invokes a Japanese sense of the relativity of memory and the reliability of consciousness.