Unbelonging

A sweeping story of resilience, identity, and the search for belonging-welcome to the City on the Sound, where no one is
quite sure where they belong.

ABOUT THE BOOK – Seattle, 1945. The war is ending-but for many, the hardest battles are just beginning. In a city transformed by global conflict, four families struggle to find their place amid rising tensions, buried prejudice, and shifting identities. Victory overseas has brought hope, but at home, fear, suspicion, and inequality continue to shape everyday life.

A female defense worker, newly awakened to injustice, risks everything as she steps into the dangerous world of labor activism threatening not only her future, but the safety of those she loves. A decorated Black war hero returns home expecting honor and opportunity, only to face a different kind of battlefield, where racism and exclusion deny him the freedoms he fought to defend. A Japanese American, released from internment, discovers that the end of war does not mean the end of hatred, and that rebuilding a life in a community that no longer trusts him may be the greatest challenge of all. A hopeful British war bride arrives chasing the promise of a new beginning, only to learn that the American dream is complicated, fragile, and not equally shared.

As labor strikes ripple through the city, racial tensions simmer, and the first shadows of Cold War hysteria begin to take hold, Seattle reveals itself as a place both beautiful and deeply divided. Old prejudices harden even as new voices rise, demanding change.

This powerful, emotionally charged novel strips away the myth of an open and enlightened city, exposing the human cost of
exclusion and the quiet courage of those who refuse to accept it.

I don’t read a lot of fiction these days, but I recently read a new novel about Seattle in the late 1940s, Unbelonging by David J. Jepsen (Historium Press, 2026). Jepsen is a historian and teacher of history at Tacoma Community College. The book is pitched on the cover as “a portrait of decency battling a rising tide of hate.”

Unbelonging covers a period of Seattle history that sometimes falls into the memory hole: It is post-WWII and pre-1962 World’s Fair. It focuses on four families and their personal trials as they try to make lives in a Seattle that has been transformed by the war economy and growth, and the incarceration of Japanese-Americans. It is a city riven with labor strife, and locked in by exclusionary practices like property covenants and redlining.

There is much in this novel that resonates with issues today: housing shortages, bigotry, anti-immigrant feelings, a civic space under the pressure of political witch-hunting. We follow the lives of a Japanese family trying to re-enter life in Seattle after incarceration and still facing racism; a Black city bus driver searching for a home; an English war-bride in a very problematic relationship with her struggling GI husband; and a Rosie-the-Riveter who loves her job yet runs afoul of Boeing and her husband because of her pro-labor politics.

Jepsen infuses the story with real locations and real public figures, like the communist-hunting legislator Albert Canwell, Longshore union activist Harry Bridges and broadcast owner Dorothy Stimson Bullitt of KING TV fame, to name a few. It also features some recognizable events, like the earthquake that rocked the region from Olympia to Seattle in 1949. (We’ll be touching on that in the upcoming Season 12 of Mossback’s Northwest, by the way.)

The fictional characters and their personal stories are compelling, their life challenges heartbreaking. But Jepsen’s novel makes the case that history should not be sanitized, and even better, that stories like this make the point that difficult times, bad behavior and cruel policies can also produce quiet, yet often forgotten heroes, working to make change.

Housing and civil rights advocates, people who listen when others won’t, church groups that try to care for their oppressed neighbors, all can make a difference. The problems encountered by Jepsen’s people all really happened here in immediate post-war Puget Sound, and many of the issues are still with us today. The history that some consider bad for public morale often contains positive lessons, which is one reason it should not be erased or forgotten. Challenges continue, but books like Jepsen’s Unbelonging make a positive contribution in reminding us of the possibilities of change and the struggles of individuals who seek it.