Books by Kyoko Mori

A family tale for new readers, from a New York Times Notable author in her stride. A young girl leaves Tokyo with her mother in 1979, carrying her pink suitcase to a new home, a new father and sister, on a dairy farm in Wisconsin. Thirty-three years later, her mother's belongings are found packed into boxes, her furniture draped in white sheets. Without so much as a note, she has left the two sisters connected by history, by some idea of family, to look for her. What happens when people lose their way home? Like a little barn cat, they grab onto a second family. . . and start again.

A memoir of crossing cultures, losing love and finding home by a New York Times Notable author in her prime. As steadily and quietly as her marriage falls apart, so Kyoko Mori?s understanding of knitting deepens. From the flawed school mittens made in her native Japan, where needlework is used as a way to prepare women for marriage and silence, to the beautiful unmatched patterns of cardigans, hats and shawls made in the American Midwest, Kyoko draws the connection between knitting and the new life she tried to establish in the U.S. From the suicide of her mother to the last empty days of her marriage, Kyoko finds a way to begin again on her own terms. Interspersed with fact and history about knitting throughout, the narrative touchingly contemplates the nature of love, loss and what holds a marriage together. In the tradition of M F K Fisher?s The Gastronomical Me, Joan Didion?s Where I Was From and Michael Pollan?s The Botany of Desire, Mori examines a specific subject to understand human nature - when to unravel, when to begin again, when to drop the stitch, and when to declare?it?s finished.