Emily Itami

''I ADORE EMILY ITAMI''S WRITING'' FLORENCE KNAPPSisters Rei, Kiki and Ai have always had to look out for one another - but life has taken them on very different paths. Eldest daughter Rei is spiky and sensible, distracting herself with an all-consuming job at a financial corporation in London. Big-hearted Kiki is a single mother in Tokyo, juggling the demands of her young son and the cantankerous elderly residents of the retirement home she works in. The free-spirited youngest, Ai , is a Japanese pop idol who has found fame and fortune but lost herself along the way. When Ai is embroiled in a scandal and thrust into the spotlight, Rei must pick up the pieces of her family once more. Over the course of a summer in their childhood home on the Japanese coast, the sisters reunite with their sharp-tongued grandmother, entertain Kiki''s irrepressible son and silently worry about Ai, carefully avoiding the subject of their mother''s death fifteen years before. But silence between sisters can only last for so long . . . Transporting, funny and moving, Kakigori Summer is an uplifting exploration of love and loss, sisterhood and family, the stories we tell ourselves about the past and how they determine our future.