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Books > Fiction > Genre fiction > War fiction > Vietnam War fiction
Winner of the Blogger's Book Prize, 2021 Shortlisted for the
People's Book Prize, 2021 Winner of Best Literary Fiction and Best
Multicultural Fiction at American Book Fest International Book
Awards, 2021 'An epic account of Viet Nam's painful 20th-century
history, both vast in scope and intimate in its telling... Moving
and riveting.' Viet Thanh Nguyen, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of
The Sympathizer Selected as a Best Book of 2020 by NB Magazine *
BookBrowse * Buzz Magazine * NPR * Washington Independent Review of
Books * Real Simple * She Reads * A Hindu's View * Thoughts from a
Page One family, two generations of women and a war that will
change their lives forever Ha Noi, 1972. Huong and her grandmother,
Tran Dieu Lan, cling to one another in their improvised shelter as
American bombs fall around them. For Tran Dieu Lan, forced to flee
the family farm with her six children decades earlier as the
Communist government rose to power in the North, this experience is
horribly familiar. Seen through the eyes of these two unforgettable
women, The Mountains Sing captures their defiance and
determination, hope and unexpected joy. Vivid, gripping, and
steeped in the language and traditions of Viet Nam, celebrated
Vietnamese poet Nguyen's richly lyrical debut weaves between the
lives of a grandmother and granddaughter to paint a unique picture
of a country pushed to breaking point, and a family who refuse to
give up. 'Devastating... From the French and Japanese occupations
to the Indochina wars, The Great Hunger, land reform and the
Vietnam War, it's a story of resilience, determination, family and
hope in a country blighted by pain.' Refinery29
The million-copy bestseller, which is a ground-breaking meditation
on war, memory, imagination, and the redemptive power of
storytelling. 'The Things They Carried' is, on its surface, a
sequence of award-winning stories about the madness of the Vietnam
War; at the same time it has the cumulative power and unity of a
novel, with recurring characters and interwoven strands of plot and
theme. But while Vietnam is central to 'The Things They Carried',
it is not simply a book about war. It is also a book about the
human heart - about the terrible weight of those things we carry
through our lives.
The acclaimed novel from the award-winning author of 'If I Die in a
Combat Zone', 'Going After Cacciato' and 'In the Lake of the
Woods'. The action in 'Northern Lights' takes place not in Vietnam
but back in the USA, as Tim O'Brien explores the after-effects of
that war - on those who served, and those they left behind. Set in
the frozen wilderness of north Minnesota, it concerns two brothers,
one who served in Vietnam, and has returned tough, cynical and
world-weary; and the other who stayed at home. When they take off
on a long skiing trip together through the frozen woods, they
quickly get lost in a blizzard, and are tested to their limits as
they face a battle against the elements and each other.
From the International Booker Prize shortlisted author of The Order
of the Day and The War of the Poor comes a searing account of a
conflict that dealt a fatal blow to French colonialism 'Absolutely
spectacular' - France Info 'Scathing and clever' - Le Temps 19
October 1950. The war is not going to plan. In Paris, politicians
gather to discuss what to do about Indochina. The conflict is
unpopular back home in France: too expensive, and too far away for
the public to care. Withdrawal is not an option - a global power
cannot surrender to an army of peasants - but victory is impossible
without more soldiers and more money. The soldiers can be sourced
from the colonies, but the money is out of the question. A solution
needs to be found. In this gripping and shocking novel, Eric
Vuillard exposes the tangled web of politicians, bankers and titans
of industry who all had a vested interest in France's prolonged
presence in lands far from Paris. Skilfully skewering the guilty,
Vuillard shows us how key players in conflicts throughout history
often have a motivation even deeper and darker than nationalism and
political ideology-greed. As well as bringing scenes from the
battlefields to life, Vuillard looks beyond this visceral reality
on the ground to the cold calculations of the boardroom elite with
the power to turn a military win or loss into their financial gain.
Short, sharp and brutal, An Honourable Exit is a journey behind
closed doors to witness how history is really made.
'Fantastic' The Sunday Times 'Marvellous... Hugely impressive'
Guardian 'Beautiful, brilliant, powerful' Madeline Miller,
bestselling author of Circe Two young Vietnamese women go missing
decades apart. Both are fearless, both are lost. And both will have
their revenge. 1986: The teenage daughter of a wealthy Vietnamese
family gets lost in an abandoned rubber plantation while fleeing
her angry father, and is forever changed by the experience. 2011:
Twenty-five years later, a young, unhappy Vietnamese-American
disappears from her new home in Saigon without a trace. The fates
of both women are inescapably linked, bound together by past
generations, by ghosts and ancestors, by the history of possessed
bodies and possessed lands. Violet Kupersmith's heart-pounding
fever dream of a novel hurtles through the ghostly secrets of
Vietnamese history to create an immersive, playful, utterly
unforgettable debut. 'Fiction as daring and accomplished as Violet
Kupersmith's first novel reignites my love of the form and its
kaleidoscopic possibilities' David Mitchell, author of Cloud Atlas
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Dust Child
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Nguyen Phan Que Mai
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'Dazzling. Sharply drawn and hauntingly beautiful.' Elif Shafak,
Women's Prize-shortlisted author of The Island of Missing Trees In
1969, two sisters from rural Viet Nam leave their parents' home and
travel to the bustling city of Sai Gon. Soon their lives are swept
up in the unstoppable flames of a war that is blazing through their
country. They begin working as 'bar girls' in one of the drinking
dens frequented by American GIs, forced to accept that survival now
might mean compromising the values they once treasured. Decades
later, two men wander through the streets and marketplaces of a
very different Sai Gon: modern, forward-looking, healing. Phong -
the son of a Black American soldier and a Vietnamese woman -
embarks on a search to find his parents and a way out of Viet Nam,
while Dan, a war veteran, hopes that retracing the steps of his
youth will ease the PTSD that has plagued him for decades. When the
lives of these unforgettable characters converge, each is forced to
reckon with the explosive events of history that still ripple
through their lives. Now they must work out what it takes to move
forward in this richly poetic saga from Nguyen Phan Que Mai at her
very best.
A beautiful, powerful and utterly devastating novel from
Orange-prize shortlisted author Georgina Harding 'Georgina
Harding's novel is the finely tuned work of a writer exceptionally
at ease with her craft and a testament to the power and poetry of
clean and disciplined prose' Guardian The memory of war will stay
with a man longer than anything else. Dawn, mist clearing over rice
fields, a burning Vietnamese village, and a young photographer
takes the shot that might make his career. The image, of a staring
soldier in the midst of mayhem, will become one of the great
photographs of the war. But what Jonathan has seen in that village
is more than he can bear... He flees to Japan, to lose himself in
the vastness of Tokyo, and to take different kinds of pictures: of
streets and crowds and cherry blossom - and of a girl with whom he
is no longer lost. Yet even here his history will catch up with
him: that photograph and his responsibility in taking it; his
responsibility as a witness to war, and to other events buried deep
in his past. The first in Harding's cycle of acclaimed novels on
themes of witness, memory and silence, The Gun Room is beautiful,
powerful and utterly devastating.
An odyssey of loss and salvation ranging across four generations of
fathers and sons, in the finest tradition of American storytelling.
The year is 1966 and a young man named Vollie Frade, almost on a
whim, enlists in the United States Marine Corps to fight in
Vietnam. Breaking definitively from his rural Iowan parents, Vollie
puts in motion a chain of events that sees him go to work for
people with intentions he cannot yet grasp. From the Cambodian
jungle, to a flophouse in Queens, to a commune in New Mexico,
Vollie's path traces a secret history of life on the margins of
America, culminating with an inevitable and terrible reckoning.
Scibona's story of a restless soldier pressed into service for a
clandestine branch of the US government unfolds against the
backdrop of the seismic shifts in global politics of the second
half of the twentieth century. Epic in scope but intimate in
feeling, this is a deeply immersive read from a rising star of
American fiction.
After sixty-eight-year-old David Granger crashes his BMW, medical tests reveal a brain tumor that he readily attributes to his wartime Agent Orange exposure. He wakes up from surgery repeating a name no one in his civilian life has ever heard - that of a Native American soldier whom he was once ordered to discipline. David decides to return something precious he long ago stole from the man he now calls Clayton Fire Bear. It might be the only way to find closure in a world increasingly at odds with the one he served to protect. It might also help him finally recover from his wife's untimely demise.
As David confronts his past to salvage his present, a poignant portrait emerges: that of an opinionated and goodhearted American patriot fighting like hell to stay true to his red, white, and blue heart, even as the country he loves rapidly changes in ways he doesn't always like or understand. Hanging in the balance are Granger's distant art-dealing son, Hank; his adoring seven-year-old granddaughter, Ella; and his best friend, Sue, a Vietnamese-American who respects David's fearless sincerity.
Through the controversial, wrenching, and wildly honest David Granger, Matthew Quick offers a no-nonsense but ultimately hopeful view of America's polarized psyche. By turns irascible and hilarious, insightful and inconvenient, David is a complex, wounded, honorable, and ultimately loving man. The Reason You're Alive examines how the secrets and debts we carry from our past define us; it also challenges us to look beyond our own prejudices and search for the good in our supposed enemies.
Private William Mandella is a reluctant hero in an interstellar war
against an unknowable and unconquerable alien enemy. But his
greatest test will be when he returns home. Relativity means that
for every few months' tour of duty centuries have passed on Earth,
isolating the combatants ever more from the world for whose future
they are fighting. The Earth he knew is dead. The one he returns to
. . . unrecognisable. Winner of the Nebula, Locus and Hugo awards,
The Forever War was the first title selected for the SF Masterworks
series when it launched in 1999. Inspired by Haldeman's experience
in the Vietnam War, it has been seen as a critical work of anti-war
SF. 'This is an enraged and enraging classic that deserves a place
alongside Apocalypse Now and The Deer Hunter as an expression of
the pain caused by Vietnam'- Guardian 'The book is near perfect'-
infinity plus 'This book is not only one of the best military
science fiction books ever written, but is one of the finest works
of modern American literature' - Tordotcom Welcome to The Best Of
The Masterworks: a selection of the finest in science fiction
In this anthology, Vietnamese writers describe their experience of
what they call the American War and its lasting legacy through the
lens of their own vital artistic visions. A North Vietnamese
soldier forms a bond with an abandoned puppy. Cousins find their
lives upended by the revelation that their fathers fought on
opposite sides of the war. Two lonely veterans in Hanoi meet years
after the war has ended through a newspaper dating service. A
psychic assists the search for the body of a long-vanished soldier.
The father of a girl suffering from dioxin poisoning struggles with
corrupt local officials. The twenty short stories collected in
Other Moons range from the intensely personal to narratives that
deal with larger questions of remembrance, trauma, and healing. By
a diverse set of authors, including many veterans, they span styles
from social realism to tales of the fantastic. Yet whether
describing the effects of Agent Orange exposure or telling ghost
stories, all speak to the unresolved legacy of a conflict that
still haunts Vietnam. Among the most widely anthologized and
popular pieces of short fiction about the war in Vietnam, these
works appear here for the first time in English. Other Moons offers
Anglophone audiences an unparalleled opportunity to experience how
the Vietnamese think and write about the conflict that consumed
their country from 1954 to 1975-a perspective still largely missing
from American narratives.
Nominated for the American Book Award, Ray is the bizarre,
hilarious, and consistently adventurous story of a life on the
edge. Dr. Ray--a womanizer, small-town drunk, vigilante, poet,
adoring husband--is a man trying to make sense of life in the
twentieth century. In flight from the death he dealt flying over
Vietnam, Dr. Ray struggles with those bound to him by need,
sickness, lunacy, by blood and by love.
The long-awaited new novel from one of America's most highly
regarded contemporary writers, The Committed follows the unnamed
Sympathizer as he arrives in Paris in the early 1980s with his
blood brother Bon. The pair try to overcome their pasts and ensure
their futures by engaging in capitalism in one of its purest forms:
drug dealing.Traumatized by his reeducation at the hands of his
former best friend, Man, and struggling to assimilate into French
culture, the Sympathizer finds Paris both seductive and disturbing.
As he falls in with a group of left-wing intellectuals whom he
meets at dinner parties given by his French Vietnamese "aunt," he
finds stimulation for his mind but also customers for his narcotic
merchandise. But the new life he is making has perils he has not
foreseen, whether the self-torture of addiction, the
authoritarianism of a state locked in a colonial mindset, or the
seeming paradox of how to reunite his two closest friends whose
worldviews put them in absolute opposition. The Sympathizer will
need all his wits, resourcefulness, and moral flexibility if he is
to prevail. Both literary thriller and novel of ideas, The
Committed is a blistering portrayal of commitment and betrayal that
will cement Viet Thanh Nguyen's position in the firmament of
American letters.
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The Centurions
(Paperback)
Jean Larteguy; Translated by Xan Fielding; Introduction by Robert D. Kaplan
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When The Centurions was first published in 1960, readers were
riveted by the thrilling account of soldiers fighting for survival
in hostile environments. They were equally transfixed by the
chilling moral question the novel posed: how to fight when the "age
of heroics is over." As relevant today as it was half a century
ago,The Centurions is a gripping military adventure, an extended
symposium on waging war in a new global order, and an essential
investigation of the ethics of counterinsurgency. Featuring a
foreword by renowned military expert Robert D. Kaplan, this
important wartime novel will again spark debate about controversial
tactics in hot spots around the world.
Mojave Desert, 1957. Vincent Kahn is an astronaut in training,
living with his wife in the desert. He will go on to be the first
man to walk on the moon. Fay Fern is 19-years-old and working in a
dive bar, having rejected her parents' wealth and conservatism. She
will go on to become a violent activist and one of the FBI's most
wanted. The pair's brief but intense love affair will have
repercussions that echo through the American century, intersecting
with the race to space, the rage against the Vietnam war, and the
ravages of the AIDS epidemic.
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