Description
Book SynopsisShortlisted for the 2024 Prime Minister's Literary Awards
‘A profound meditation on forgiveness and forgetting . . . Dao’s extraordinary debut novel combines fiction and history to chronicle his Vietnamese grandparents’ traumatic life.’ – The Observer
Moving from 1930s Hanoi through wars and displacements to Saigon, Paris, Melbourne and Cambridge, a deeply moving novel of memory and inheritance, colonialism and belonging, exile and home.
Born to a Vietnamese family based in Melbourne, the narrator is haunted by the story of his grandfather whose ten-year imprisonment by the Communist government in Vietnam’s notorious Chi Hoa prison looms large over his own place in the world and his choice to become a human rights lawyer. As he oscillates between identities of his Australian upbringing and his Vietnamese heritage, it is the death of his grandfather in a Parisian suburb and the birth of his daughter that cryst
