Recommendations from our site
“It’s a narrative of life in French colonial Vietnam. It’s the story of a French Catholic schoolgirl whose family has fallen on hard times and of her consensual but scandalous love affair with a rich Chinese Vietnamese. He was 25 and she was only 15 at the time. At the beginning she is attracted by his wealth, but she realizes, in the end, that he was her first love. It was a real reversal of the white expat male with a Vietnamese girl that you see in Graham Greene’s novel, The Quiet American. It broke those stereotypes. It’s radical and it’s an adventure. It just appealed to me when I first read it. It became a bestseller and a million copies were sold.” Read more...
Sherry Buchanan, Journalist
“Out of all the books we’re discussing, the mother in The Lover is the saddest” Read more...
Deborah Levy on Motherhood in Literature
Deborah Levy, Novelist
