JOAN BURBICK

Recent Novel

A fictional memoir, Erased is about what happened to Katherine Lin, a wife, young mother, and promising Chinese scientist. Decades after Lin's disappearance in war-torn China, her daughter-in-law sets out on a trek to find out who she was, how she lived, and why her death was a mystery.

Early Reviews

Joan Burbick's Erased is a novel that revolves around intuition, research and love in a story that wants to know why the past matters. It is a compelling narrative about an American woman who obsessively researches her Chinese American husband's past to unravel the truth of his background, one that appears to be a construct of family secrets and lies. She endeavors to write a "memoir" about his mother's life and death, set against the history of the relationship between China and America from World War Two to the present. The novel includes real photographs and documents and questions what is real and what is fiction and why truth matters. An engaging novel that speaks to our times." Xu Xi , 許素細, novelist, That Man in Our Lives, Habit of a Foreign Sky Joan Burbick's travels to Asia have led to her remarkable novel, Erased. A Polish American woman is troubled by her Chinese American husband's lack of knowledge about his mother. Her desire to find out about his mother leads her back in time, beginning in the 1940s, a period China saw cataclysmic changes during the Japanese invasion and its Civil War. In the end, the wife feels she is living a double life as she tries to live in the present with her husband. Erased is a compelling novel about identity." John Keeble, novelist, Yellowfish, The Appointment

Where to Purchase

Available from Ingram, Bookshop.org, Amazon.com, Powells.com, Your local bookstore, and directly from the Publisher: www.redbatbooks.com/erased

Previously

STRIPLAND

Based on the 2009 shooting of a Nez Perce man by an Idaho State Police officer, STRIPLAND follows the stories of a homeless man, a woman lawyer, a bereft photographer, and an internet trickster as they try to understand, exploit, or seek revenge for the killing.

What People Say

Now writing novels, Burbick is at once a poet telling stories, a dancer running interference, and a sculptor of mirrors, making us look at the magnetic fields that entwine us. Brian Charles Clark, Washington State Magazine