Books by Viet Thanh Nguyen

“It’s a meditation on his parents, who are Vietnamese Catholics. They came to the United States and ended up in California, where they raised their two sons. It’s about the experience of being a migrant…It’s a very original approach to memoir, that encompasses history, drama and indeed contemporary politics—although not entirely frontally. It’s not just about migration, it’s also a meditation on memory and reality and ‘what is truth?’ But it situates those questions that we all share in a context of biculturalism, of displacement, and of relationship with the past.” Read more...

The Best Nonfiction Books: The 2024 Baillie Gifford Prize Shortlist

Isabel Hilton, Journalist

“Viet Thanh Nguyen is a powerful new voice for the Vietnamese who left the country after the end of the war in 1975, mainly South Vietnamese who fled after the fall of Saigon in 1975 and settled in the US. The protagonist is half French, half Vietnamese. He’s a spy working undercover for the communists in Saigon and then in the US. When he returns to post-war communist Vietnam, he is imprisoned by his own side. The novel ends at sea with the narrator leaving Vietnam among a crowd of boat people. Viet Thanh Nguyen illustrates the complexity of divided loyalties that come from Vietnam’s history—from being a colony for 100 years, then at war for over 30 years, with families split between supporters of the North and supporters of the South.” Read more...

The Best Vietnamese Novels

Sherry Buchanan, Journalist