#1 NATIONAL BESTSELLER

When the Second World War broke out, Ralph MacLean chose to escape his troubled life on the Magdalen Islands in eastern Canada and volunteer to serve his country overseas. Meanwhile, in Vancouver, Mitsue Sakamoto saw her family and her stable community torn apart after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.

Like many young Canadian soldiers, Ralph was captured by the Japanese army. He would spend the war in prison camps, enduring pestilence, beatings and starvation, as well as a journey by hell ship to Japan to perform slave labour, while around him his friends and countrymen perished. Back in Canada, Mitsue and her family were expelled from their home by the government and forced to spend years eking out an existence in rural Alberta, working other people's land for a dollar a day.

By the end of the war, Ralph emerged broken but a survivor. Mitsue, worn down by years of back-breaking labour, had to start all over again in Medicine Hat, Alberta. A generation later, at a high school dance, Ralph's daughter and Mitsue's son fell in love.

Although the war toyed with Ralph's and Mitsue's lives and threatened to erase their humanity, these two brave individuals somehow surmounted enormous transgressions and learned to forgive. Without this forgiveness, their grandson Mark Sakamoto would never have come to be.

MARK SAKAMOTO is an entrepreneur and investor in digital health and digital media and is the executive vice-president of Think Research, a global digital-health company. His first book, Forgiveness: A Gift from My Grandparents, debuted as a #1 national bestseller and went on to win CBC Canada Reads in 2018. The book is being developed into a feature film and has been theatrically staged by Vancouver’s Arts Club Theatre Company and Theatre Calgary. A frequent television presence, Mark was the host and executive producer of Good People, a documentary series that explored humanity’s biggest problems and was co-produced by Vice Media and the CBC. He sits on the Giller Foundation’s board of directors. Mark Sakamoto lives in Toronto and Prince Edward County with his wife and their two daughters.

Mark Sakamoto's profile page

• OLA Evergreen Award
• CBC Canada Reads
• Edna Staebler Award for Creative Non-Fiction

“Poignantly elegant.” — Maclean’s

“Through stories of starvation and suffering, outright racism and imprisonment, Sakamoto offers a distinct and dark vantage point to Canadian history--one that does away with any geopolitical binaries of good and evil.” — The Globe and Mail

“Extraordinary and touching.” — Elle Canada

“It’s a violent world we live in, but Mark Sakamoto’s Forgiveness: A Gift From My Grandparents reminds us that things do change.” — National Post

“This book shares many examples of powerful life lessons that inspire us to embrace change as a gift from learning, and remind us that making peace with our past is possible if we hold on to what we’ve learned from our experiences.” — Shania Twain

“An unforgettable story about the power of forgiveness, set against one of the darkest periods in Canada’s history. Mark Sakamoto tells his family’s story with grace and at times brutal honesty. Painful and poignant, Forgiveness is a testament to the resilience of the human spirit.” — Mellissa Fung, author of Under an Afghan Sky

“This is an astonishing book . . . a funny, heartbreaking story of a family scarred by history’s pain and their own self-destructiveness, yet redeemed by stoic endurance and the capacity for forgiveness. You’re going to remember this book.” — Michael Ignatieff

“Mark Sakamoto’s family story shows how individuals—the author’s Canadian grandfather, a POW of the Japanese, and his Japanese-Canadian grandmother, sent to a work camp in Alberta—ultimately make their own history. This is a quintessential Canadian story, where family history is not forgotten but does not imprison its participants.” — Nathan M. Greenfield, author of The Damned