An Exquisite Sense of What is Beautiful

The personal collides with the political in this literary tour-de-force. In the 1950s, an eminent British writer pens a novel questioning the ethics of the nuclear destruction at Hiroshima and Nagasaki—but soon he’s trying to outrun his own past.

Hakone, Japan, 2003. An eminent British writer in his 70s, Sir Edward Strathairn, returns to a resort in the Japanese mountains where, in his youth, he spent a beautiful, snowed-in winter.

It was there he wrote his best-selling novel, The Waterwheel, accusing America of being in denial about the horrific aftermath of the Tokyo firebombings and the nuclear destruction at Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

London, England, 1952. A young Edward falls in love with an avant-garde American artist, Macy. After their tumultuous relationship and breakup, he heads for Japan, where he is smitten again as he writes the novel that makes him famous. 

This is as much a thrilling romance as it is a sensitive exploration of blame, power and guilt in postwar America and Japan. With a narrator whose behavior strikes the national conscience as much as his own, An Exquisite Sense of What is Beautiful will stay with readers long after the final page is turned.

J. David Simons is a Scottish author, media journalist and literary editor. His first novel, The Credit Draper, was shortlisted for the McKitterick Prize, and his subsequent novels include The Liberation of Celia Kahn (2011), The Land Agent (2014), A Woman of Integrity (2017), The Responsibility of Love (2021), as well as An Exquisite Sense of What is Beautiful. He has been awarded several bursaries from Creative Scotland and the Society of Authors and in 2012 was the recipient of a Robert Louis Stevenson Fellowship.

Simons is also a former lawyer, charity administrator, cotton farmer and university lecturer. His nomadic lifestyle has allowed him to spend considerable time in Israel, Australia, Japan and the United States, and he currently lives in Javea, Spain.