Describing The Buddha in the Attic (Anchor, $13.95) as merely “poetic” would be damning with faint praise. Julie Otsuka’s writing is spare but manages to conjure up incredible detail with well-selected phrases that bring to mind great poetry. But the novel surpasses line and verse; the women of the story live and breathe and suffer, and the reader can feel their beating pulses. Winner of a PEN/Faulkner Prize and finalist for the National Book Award, this novel tells the story of Japanese women who came to America to marry men they had never seen. The narrative carries the wives’ stories forward through assimilation into American society and conveys the indignity of their internment during the Second World War. The individual voices of these women are combined by the author into a finely wrought chorus, both beautiful and heartbreaking.