**WINNER OF THE RATHBONES FOLIO PRIZE**

The definitive book on the quake which killed more than 15,000 people.Mail Online You will not read a finer work of narrative non-fiction this year.Economist A breathtaking, extraordinary work of non-fiction.Times Literary Supplement A future classic of disaster journalism.Observer

On 11 March 2011, a massive earthquake sent a 120-foot-high tsunami smashing into the coast of north-east Japan. By the time the sea retreated, more than 18,500 people had been crushed, burned to death, or drowned. It was Japans greatest single loss of life since the atomic bombing of Nagasaki.

Richard Lloyd Parry, an award-winning foreign correspondent, lived through the earthquake in Tokyo, and spent six years reporting from the disaster zone. He met a priest who performed exorcisms on people possessed by the spirits of the dead. And he found himself drawn back again and again to a village which had suffered the greatest loss of all, a community tormented by unbearable mysteries of its own.

What really happened to the local children as they waited in the school playground in the moments before the tsunami? Why did their teachers not evacuate them to safety? And why was the unbearable truth being so stubbornly covered up?

Ghosts of the Tsunamiis a classic of literary non-fiction, a heart-breaking and intimate account of an epic tragedy, told through the personal accounts of those who lived through it. It tells the story of how a nation faced a catastrophe, and the bleak struggle to find consolation in the ruins.

Richard Lloyd Parryis Asia Editor ofThe Times. He was born in 1969 and was educated at Oxford. He has been visiting Asia for eighteen years and since 1995 has lived in Tokyo as a foreign correspondent, first for theIndependentand now forThe Times. He has reported from twenty-one countries and several wars, including Iraq, Afghanistan, Indonesia, East Timor, North Korea, Papua New Guinea, Vietnam, Kosovo and Macedonia. His work has also appeared in theLondon Review of Booksand theNew York Times Magazine. He is the author ofIn The Time of Madness, an eyewitness account of the violence that interrupted in Indonesia in the 1990s, andPeople Who Eat Darkness: The Fate of Lucie Blackman.