Daikon: A Novel

by Samuel Hawley

368 pages, Paperback

Expected publication July 28, 2026

About the author

Samuel Hawley has BA and MA degrees in history from Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario and worked in East Asia as a teacher for two decades before becoming a full-time writer. His nonfiction books include The Imjin War, about Japan's 16th-century invasion of Korea and attempted conquest of China; Speed Duel: The Inside Story of the Land Speed Record in the Sixties; Ultimate Speed, the authorized biography of land speed racing legend Craig Breedlove; and The Fight That Started the Movies, the epic story of how the emerging technology of cinema combined with prizefighting to make the world's first feature-length film. His latest book is a novel about Japan in the closing days of WWII, Daikon, hailed by John Grisham as "a breathtaking story of what might have been. Meticulously researched and beautifully written, Daikon is a riveting tale about war, intrigue, love, and perseverance.”

Reviews

[Michael · Rating 4 out of 5]

A deeply researched alternate history novel in which the Japanese military acquires an atomic bomb from the crashed American bomber before the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Technically very impressive, and showing an intimate familiarity with wartime Japan, but my only critique was that some of the characters seemed like placeholders for one or another strand of the Japanese military ethos at the time.