The Author: Karin Tanabe
The Book: A Hundred Suns
The Genre: Thriller and Historical Fiction
Lives In: Washington, DC
The Story: Officially available on April 7, A Hundred Suns is author Karin Tanabe’s newest release. “It’s about Jessie Lesage, a woman from Blacksburg, Virginia who marries a French guy who’s one of the heirs to the Michelin rubber fortune,” Tanabe says. “She gets caught up in the very glamorous, expat, Colonial world in Vietnam’s Indochina era. But she also discovers the atrocities of her husband’s company and what’s happening with the Vietnamese people at the time. This is the interwar period. So, it’s kind of the spark of how the Vietnam War happened. On the one hand, it’s very glamorous, but on the other hand, it talks a lot about the politics of the era and how French Colonial atrocities contributed to the outcome of Vietnam. I call it communism and cocktails.”
Virginia Inspiration: Jessie Lesage is Tanabe’s second main character from Virginia in her novels. “I’m very comfortable making people from the DMV area because I’m from here,” Tanabe says. “I wanted Jessie to be from a place where she saw a lot of smart people, smart women. I thought her being near a Virginia university would be good for her because she gets to see these Virginia Tech women and be like, ‘OK, there’s an out. I can have a different life.’’’
This post was originally published in our April 2020 issue. Want upcoming magazines delivered to your mailbox? Subscribe here.
