The romantic story told by Jamie Ford begins with a real incident. Henry Lee sees the opening of the old Japanese Hotel Panama, which had been boarded up for almost forty years. And this event takes Henry back to the past, to childhood, to the forties. Young Henry's world is a cloud of anxiety. The father is absorbed in the war with Japan, and nothing interests him anymore; Henry is an outcast at his prestigious school because he is the only Chinese there, and white punks lie in wait for him on the streets. But one day Henry meets Keiko, a young Japanese woman who looks at the world much more optimistically, although she has much more problems, because there is a war with Japan. Thus begins a romantic and unpredictable story that will last throughout the war... Amazing in its emotional subtlety and kind intonation, Jamie Ford's novel instantly became a bestseller, repeating the fate of Khaled Hosseini's The Kite Runner. Millions of copies in circulation, publications in almost three dozen languages, reader discussions on book portals - such is the fate of this debut novel, which has become a real event in recent years.