The peak of the hot season, 1942: The wars in Europe and Asia and the Japanese occupation have upset the uneasy balance of French Indochina. In a small Vietnamese fishing village, Tuyet ekes out a living with her aunt, cousin, and two-year-old daughter. But when Tuyet meets Japanese major Yamazaki Takeshi, to her surprise, she comes to find a strange kinship with him. A wounded veteran with a good heart, he grows to resent the Empire for what it has taken—and the promises it has failed to keep. As the Viet Minh begin to battle the French and Takeshi risks his life for the Resistance, Tuyet and her family are drawn into the conflict, with devastating consequences. A lushly panoramic novel, by turns gritty and profoundly moving, Twilight Territory is a war story and a love story that offers a fascinating perspective on Vietnam’s struggles to break free of its French colonial past.

One of the Ten Best Books of the Year, Washington Post Book World
One of the Los Angeles Times' Favorite Books of the Year
One of the Top Ten National Books of 2008, Portland Oregonian
A 2009 Honor Book of the Asian/Pacific American Librarians Association
"Few books have combined the historical scope and the literary skill to give the -foreign reader a sense of events from a Vietnamese perspective. . . . Now we can add Andrew Pham's Eaves of Heaven to this list of indispensable books."
--"New York Times Book Review"
"Searing . . . vivid-and harrowing . . . Here is war and life through the eyes of a Vietnamese everyman."
--Seattle Times
Once wealthy landowners, Thong Van Pham's family was shattered by the tumultuous events of the twentieth century: the French occupation of Indochina, the Japanese invasion during World War II, and the Vietnam War.
Told in dazzling chapters that alternate between events in the past and those closer to the present, "The Eaves of Heaven" brilliantly re-creates the trials of everyday life in Vietnam as endured by one man, from the fall of Hanoi and the collapse of French colonialism to the frenzied evacuation of Saigon. Pham offers a rare portal into a lost world as he chronicles Thong Van Pham's heartbreaks, triumphs, and bizarre reversals of fortune, whether as a South Vietnamese soldier pinned down by enemy fire, a prisoner of the North Vietnamese under brutal interrogation, or a refugee desperately trying to escape Vietnam after the last American helicopter has abandoned Saigon. This is the story of a man caught in the maelstrom of twentieth-century politics, a gripping memoir told with the urgency of a wartime dispatch by a writer of surpassing talent.