Description
Book SynopsisYou can go home again. When twenty-three-year-old Maia Trieu, a curator’s assistant at the Museum of Folklore & Rocks in Little Saigon, Orange County, is offered a research grant to Vietnam for the summer of 1991, she cannot refuse. The grant’s sponsor has one stipulation: Maia is to contact her great-aunt to pass on plans to overthrow the current government. The expatriates did not anticipate that Maia would become involved with excursions in search of her mother or attract an entourage: an American traveler, a government agent, an Amerasian singer, and a cat. Maia carries out what she believes is her role as a filial daughter to her late father, a former ARVN soldier, by returning to their homeland to continue the fight for an independent Vietnam. Along the way, however, she meets a cast of characters—historical and fictional, living and dead—who propel her on a journey of self-discovery, through which she begins to understand what it means to love.
Trade ReviewLam’s novel is a whimsical, if elegiac, perception-altering hero’s journey inspired by mourning and displacement, in which the dead roam throughout the country and former and would-be soldiers hide out in Cambodian borderlands. In Fire Summer, truth and art coexist, while imagination never quite overpowers experience.
—Diacritic
Like a strip of curtain between the dead and the living, Fire Summer is at once ephemeral and expansive. A haunting debut from a writer whose characters, lovingly described, pass not only through rivers and airports, but also despair and separation. We are ferried with them to the other side—one where the fractured are finally come home.
—Uzma Aslam Khan, author of Trespassing and Thinner Than Skin
Fire Summer delivers a war-ravaged Vietnam rich in history, folklore, the tragedy of families torn asunder, and the beauty of Buddhist wisdom that connects the living and dead. Suspenseful, Thuy Da Lam’s story of Maia Trieu’s journey home is an impressive debut.
— Charles Johnson, author of Middle Passage
“What is the shape of one’s life when one’s action is based on love?” So asks a character in Thuy Da Lam’s lyrical novel, Fire Summer, a work that shows us the Vietnam beyond the war movies. Lam deftly explores the slippery interplay between heritage and identity, history and duty, ultimately proving that each of us is so much more than the places we come from. An important debut.
— Quan Barry, author of She Weeps Each Time You’re Born
In Fire Summer, past and present blend with here and there in ways that continually surprise, yet somehow seem destined. Vietnam is the setting and the legacy for the returning expatriate Maia, and for an entourage of vivid characters who encounter and reencounter each other as they travel from the shores to the mountains, searching for family, closure, and a home. A beautiful, funny, and stunning novel that will reward repeated reading.
—Craig Howes, author of Voices of the Vietnam POWs: Witnesses to Their Fight
A girl plucked from the high seas off Vietnam is sent as a young woman to connect with an aging guerilla faction. A detective story, a quest for the mythic heart of Vietnam on its stones and soil—a novel of rare beauty.
—Robert Onopa, author of The Pleasure Tube
