Books by Toni Morgan

Following WWII, Japan is broken and in ruins, the people are starving. Nobuko Ito, a Japanese-American trapped in Japan by the war, and temporarily denied the right to return to her home in California, decides to remain in Japan after learning both her parents have died. Meanwhile, back in America, Keiko Ugawa and her father return to Portland, Oregon, after their release from Camp Minidoka in Idaho, where they spent three years behind barbed-wire with nearly ten-thousand other Japanese-Americans. Back in Portland, they face suspicion and 'No Japs' signs. In Idaho, Virginia Franconi marries John Sato, and together, with Virginia's brother Marc, turn the old farm into one of the state's biggest and most prosperous. Back in Japan, Nobuko is saddened by her failure to become pregnant. Masato surprises her with tickets to America, where they are to witness the marriage of Nobuko's brother, Mako, to Keiko Ugawa, who had met at Camp Minidoka. LOTUS BLOSSOM UNFURLING fills in the years and unites the families from Morgan's two previous novels, ECHOES FROM A FALLING BRIDGE and HARVEST THE WIND.

Virginia Franconi left home at eighteen, like the hounds of hell were nipping at my heels. Now, in her mid-twenties, she returns to the family farm in Idaho. Her sour, belligerent father, once an iron-fisted ruler, is weak and frail, no longer a threat. Marc, Virginia's brother, runs the farm. Virginia is pregnant, a secret she doesn't initially share with Marc or her father. With most young men off fighting the war in Europe or the Pacific, Marc worries who will help grow the food demanded by a hungry nation. When President Roosevelt orders all people of Japanese descent removed from the West Coast, Keiko Ugawa and her family find themselves in a crowded, tar-papered barrack, surrounded by barbed-wire and guard towers, where temperatures reach 130F in summer and minus 30F in winter. Dust and wind are constants. Her mother dies and Keiko's anger at authorities intensifies. Marc's worries about who will help him are solved when the government allows internees from nearby Camp Minidoka to work on surrounding farms. A saddened and still angry Keiko comes to the Franconi farm, along with several young men. While Keiko works in the house with Virginia, now approaching her due date, the young men join Marc in the fields. Keiko helps deliver Virginia's baby. The two women gradually become friends.

During the turbulent sixties, the call for Quebec independence created a political and social maelstrom in Canada. For nearly ten years, riots, bombings, labor strikes and violent street scenes-many even worse than what we're seeing today-were part of everyday life in Montreal, the epicenter of battle. PATRIMONY represents the essence of that still-smoldering conflict. Told from the viewpoints of two brothers and a sister, PATRIMONY is about what happens in a country when political ideology resorts to terrorism. It's about what happens in a family when one brother believes in responsible political action to achieve his goals, and the other brother, a time-bomb ticking toward an explosion, will do anything to get what he wants, including using his own sister for blackmail. From PATRIMONY'S opening chapter, a trip to North Carolina where brother and sister buy explosives from gunrunners, to a factory bombing and a symbolic attempt to blow up a bridge, the plot moves quickly. It weaves through cultural differences, family and political conflicts, and ends in an unprecedented political crisis-Quebec under martial law.

Before he died, Henri Morais thought changing his name to Henry Maris, doing good deeds and surrounding himself with the splendor of the mountains in northern Idaho was enough. He thought that his guilt over being part of the violence of the Quebec separatist movement would be buried with him. It wasn't. A woman who comes to the funeral, a stranger, turns out to be the loose thread that begins to unravel his hidden past. Ellen Maris, isn't sure whom she's most upset with: her daughter, for going to Montreal and digging up what had happened so many years before; her son, for encouraging his sister; or Henry, for dying and leaving her. In desperation, she starts a small baking business from her home, all the while brooding over what Marie might find out in Montreal. Montreal during the violence-prone sixties; a bomb thrown into a crowded café in Bahrain; two helicopters burned by eco-terrorists in Idaho. TWO-HEARTED CROSSING tells the story of a flawed family, struggling to move forward in their suddenly upside-down world. It also tells a story of resilience, of survival, of hope and of love.

In 1939, Nobuko Ito, a young Japanese-American woman, travels from her home in California to Japan, where she is to learn the culture of her ancestors. Tensions grow between the two countries. Soon her country and the country she has grown to love are at war. The next four years are brutal, both for those who go to fight (Hirotaka Katsuragawa, a young art student, Masato Abi, the son of local merchants, Toshio Hara, a farmer turned soldier), and those who remain behind (Nobuko, Yoko Yoshida, who manages the local pottery factory while her husband is fighting the war, and the women and children of Nishimi). In 1997, these characters are in their twilight years. Nobuko is a widow. Yoko is reduced to dusting and serving tea in the factory she once ran. Toshio has gone mad. Hirotaka has become the sensei, honored teacher. While the pottery factory is the heart of the village, Hirotaka is its soul. When a murder is committed, the motive is found buried beneath the rubble of a bridge destroyed in New Guinea, fifty-five years earlier. The noise of its fall still echoes...