The personal collides with the political in this literary tour-de-force. In the 1950s, an eminent British writer pens a novel questioning the ethics of the nuclear destruction at Hiroshima and Nagasaki-but soon he's trying to outrun his own past.

Hakone, Japan, 2003. An eminent British writer in his 70s, Sir Edward Strathairn, returns to a resort in the Japanese mountains where, in his youth, he spent a beautiful,snowed-in winter.

It was there he wrote his best-selling novel, The Waterwheel, accusing America of being in denial about the horrific aftermath of the Tokyo firebombings and the nuclear destruction at Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

London, England, 1952. A young Edward falls in love with an avant-garde Americanartist, Macy. After their tumultuous relationship and breakup, he heads for Japan, wherehe is smitten again as he writes the novel that makes him famous.

This is as much a thrilling romance as it is a sensitive exploration of blame, power andguilt in postwar America and Japan. With a narrator whose behavior strikes the nationalconscience as much as his own, An Exquisite Sense of What is Beautiful will stay withreaders long after the final page is turned.