RACHEL’S PICK

Ever since it came out in Nguyn An L’s sterling English translation, Chinatown has been a perennial favourite. Time to make it official! This book is everything you ever wanted from the plotless fiction shelf. One of my favourite books ever. -RG

An abandoned package is discovered in the Paris Metro: the subway workers suspect its a terrorist bomb. A Vietnamese woman sitting nearby, her son asleep on her shoulder, waits and begins to reflect on her life, from her constrained childhood in communist Hanoi, to a long period of study in Leningrad during the Gorbachev period, and finally to the Parisian suburbs where she now teaches English. Through everything runs her passion for Thuy, the father of her son, a writer who lives in Saigons Chinatown, and who, with the shadow of the China-Vietnam border war falling darkly between them, she has not seen for eleven years.

Through her breathless, vertiginous, and deeply moving monologue from beside the subway tracks, the narrator attempts to once and for all face the past and exorcize the passion that haunts her.

Translated by Nguyn An L.

Paperback | 184 pages | 5.20″ x 8.10″