Keiko Kitigawa disembarks from a plane on a New York airstrip in June 1952, turning one scarred cheek away from the pop and flare of news photographers’ cameras. On the surface, she is impeccably composed, an eighteen-year-old survivor of the atomic blast that destroyed Hiroshima and vaporized the people she loved best. But the committee who is sponsoring her visit to America for charitable reconstructive surgery want to crack that surface. America is obsessed with the atom bomb, and to achieve its political ends, the committee expects Keiko to become the poster child of the ban the bomb movement, peddling her story to the American public in all its searing, guilt-inducing detail.

Daisy Lawrence, Keiko’s suburban hostess as she recuperates, is assigned to soften up the girl and pry her story out of her. With McCarthyism in full swing and the Hydrogen bomb on the brink of completion, Radiance traces the story of the deepening relationship between Daisy and the girl. Wary manoeuvres, whispered intimacies and wrenching betrayals dance the two women - 'host mother' and 'Hiroshima maiden' - unbearably close to the burning stories at each other’s hearts.

Reviews

• 'Her prose is so clean, her observation so translucent, her touch so light, affectionate and humorous, that all her characters thrive' SUNDAY INDEPENDENT
• 'The muse is plying her work in these stories
• that, or perhaps the living spirits of Alice Munro and Annie Proulx … [Shaena Lambert] has the potential to rival them both’ GLOBE AND MAIL
• …is an absorbing debut which exquisitely locates unsentimental emotional histories in an America buoyant with postwar consumerism and racked with paranoia' FT MAGAZINE

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Published 03/05/2007