"Chicago, 1944: twenty-year-old Aki Ito and her parents have just been released from Manzanar, the California concentration camp where they have been 'interned' by the US government since the aftermath of Pearl Harbor, together with thousands of other Japanese Americans. The life the Itos were forced to leave behind is gone; instead, they are being resettled in Chicago, where Aki's older sister, Rose, was sent months earlier as a forerunner of the...

An ode to George Orwell's "1984" told in alternating male and female voices relates the stories of Aomame, an assassin for a secret organization who discovers that she has been transported to an alternate reality, and Tengo, a mathematics lecturer and novice writer.

After the war is over, seven outlawed kindlings--elite, magic-wielding warriors whose devastating power comes at the cost of their own young lives--must confront their pasts, their trauma and their grim fates to reclaim who they once were and fight one last time.