Jill Vedebrand

The Nagasaki Pearls Jill Vedebrand

The Nagasaki Pearls is the dramatic and intimate story of three families from Japan, Sweden, and Brazil, who cross the seas on a voyage that they hope will lead them to the lost pearls of the Takahashi family. Years ago, when Leif from Sweden and Georgio from Brazil were young sailors, they rescued a Japanese sea captain from a shipwreck and he gave them a precious set of pearls before he died.

Without knowing their significance, they sold them, and the money completely transformed their lives. Now, twenty years later, Taru Takahashi is determined to get his family's heirloom pearls back. The pearls have been in his family for centuries and should never have been sold. He begins his search by travelling to Rio de Janeiro with Mariko, his seventeen-year-old granddaughter, to find Georgio, one of the two sailors who were given the pearls.

On the other side of the world in Sweden, Leif and Ella, their fifteen-year-old daughter, Helen, and nineteen-year-old son, Jörgen, are drawn into the search, at a time when their own lives are in turmoil. When the families unite in the quest for the pearls, no one knows, or even suspects, how their journey will end.