The Reading List

Leslie Shimotakahara, a young, disenchanted English professor, struggles to revive her childhood love of reading. Returning home to rethink her life, she bonds with her father Jack over discussions about the lives, loves and works of the novelists on their shared reading list – Wharton, Joyce, Woolf and Atwood, to name a few. But when their conversations about literature unearth some heartbreaking, deeply buried family secrets surrounding Jack’s own childhood – growing up Japanese-Canadian in the aftermath of World War II – Leslie’s world is changed forever. Could discovering the truth about her father’s past hold the key to her finally being happy in love, life and career?

The Reading List reveals how literature can sometimes help us expose our past, understand our loved ones and point us toward our future.