The Refugees

With the coruscating gaze that informed The Sympathizer, in The Refugees Viet Thanh Nguyen gives voice to lives led between two worlds, the adopted homeland & the country of birth. From a young Vietnamese refugee who suffers profound culture shock when he comes to live with two gay men in San Francisco, to a woman whose husband is suffering from dementia & starts to confuse her for a former lover, to a girl living in Ho Chi Minh City whose older half-sister comes back from America having seemingly accomplished everything she never will, the stories are a captivating testament to the dreams & hardships of immigration.

The second piece of fiction by a major new voice in American letters, The Refugees is a beautifully written & sharply observed book about the aspirations of those who leave one country for another, & the relationships & desires for self-fulfillment that define our lives.

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Viet Thanh Nguyen’s novel The Sympathizer is a New York Times best seller & won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Other honors include the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, the Edgar Award for Best First Novel from the Mystery Writers of America, the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction from the American Library Association, the First Novel Prize from the Center for Fiction, a Gold Medal in First Fiction from the California Book Awards, & the Asian/Pacific American Literature Award from the Asian/Pacific American Librarian Association.

His other books are Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam & the Memory of War (a finalist for the National Book Award in nonfiction & the National Book Critics Circle Award in General Nonfiction) & Race & Resistance: Literature & Politics in Asian America.

He co-authored Chicken of the Sea, a children’s book, with his then 6-year-old son, Ellison, & his most recent novel is The Committed, the sequel to The Sympathizer. HBO turned The Sympathizer into a TV series in 2024, directed by Park Chan-wook.