Dust Child
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Finalist for the 2024 Dayton Literary Peace Prize. The author of the award-winning The Mountains Sing returns with a suspenseful and moving saga of wartime love, family, loss, and redemption set in Viet Nam.
In 1969, sisters Trang and Quynh, desperate to help their parents pay off debts, leave their rural village to work in a bar in Sài Gòn. Once in the big city, the young girls learn how to drink and flirt (and more) with American GIs in return for money.
Decades later, an American veteran, Dan, returns to Viet Nam with his wife, Linda, hoping to find a way to heal from his PTSD; instead, secrets he thought he had buried surface and threaten his marriage. At the same time, Phong--the son of a Black American soldier and a Vietnamese woman--embarks on a search to find both his parents and a way out of Viet Nam to a better life in the United States for himself, his wife Bình, and his children.
Past and present converge as these characters come together to confront decisions made during a time of war--decisions that reverberate throughout one another's lives and ultamately allow them and find common ground across race, generation, culture, and language. Immersive, moving, and lyrical, Dust Child tells an unforgettable story of how those who inherited tragedy can redefine their destinies with hard-earned wisdom, compassion, courage, and joy.
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About this Author
Nguyen Phan Que Mai is the author of The Mountains Sing, runner-up for the 2021 Dayton Literary Peace Prize, winner of the 2020 BookBrowse Best Debut Award, the 2021 International Book Awards, the 2021 PEN Oakland/Josephine Miles Literary Award, and the 2020 Lannan Literary Award Fellowship for Fiction. She has published twelve books of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction and has received some of the top literary prizes in Viet Nam. Her writing has been translated into twenty languages and has appeared in major publications, including the New York Times. She has a PhD in creative writing from Lancaster University. She is an advocate for the rights of disadvantaged groups in Viet Nam and has founded several scholarship programs, and she was named by Forbes Vietnam as one of twenty inspiring women of 2021. For more information, visit: www.nguyenphanquemai.com]]>
Reviews
Dust Child establishes Nguyen Phan Que Mai as one of our finest observers of the devastating consequences of war, and proves, once more, her ability to captivate readers and lure them into Viet Nam's rich and poignant history."--Viet Thanh Nguyen, Pulitzer Prize winning author of The Sympathizer and The Committed]]>
"Dust Child is satisfying, lyrical, and deeply empathetic. Nguyen Phan Que Mai is a born storyteller."
--Gabrielle Zevin, New York Times bestselling author of Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow]]>
Elif Shafak, author of The Island of Missing Trees]]>
Dust Child, rupture leads to emotional richness and pain creates the pathways worth walking. I truly cannot wait for the rest of the world to celebrate this book."--Chanel Miller, New York Times bestselling author of Know My Name]]>
Dust Child is simply stunning."--Eric Nguyen, author of Things We Lost To The Water]]>
Dust Child, Que Mai displays the same tenderness and compassion for her characters, hard-earned understanding of human trauma, and poetically evocative language that made her debut novel The Mountains Sing an international bestseller beloved around the world."
--Natalie Jenner, internationally bestselling author of The Jane Austen Society]]>
Kristin Harmel, New York Times bestselling author of The Forest of Vanishing Stars]]>
Thi Bui, award-winning author of The Best We Could Do]]>
Dust Child brings to life the heartbreaking experiences of young American men and young Vietnamese women who were pulled into the vortex of the Viet Nam War and the tragedy inherited by their Amerasian children. Nguyen Phan Que Mai's powerful novel enables us to travel deep into Viet Nam's past and present days so that we can bear witness to the courage of her Amerasian, Vietnamese, and American characters. This eye-opening and fascinating novel is a must-read!"--Le Ly Hayslip, bestselling author of When Heaven and Earth Changed Places and The Child of War, Woman of Peace]]>
Robert Mason, New York Times bestselling author of Chickenhawk]]>
The Mountains Sing, Nguyen Phan Que Mai has masterfully captured the toll of war and its aftermath on a Black Amerasian, an outcast in the country of his birth, on an American vet, haunted and seeking redemption, and on two Vietnamese sisters, forced by economic hardship into circumstances they could not have foreseen. Nguyen creates, in her luminous prose, a gripping and nuanced narrative of men and women caught in the web of war and its aftermath." --Steven DeBonis, author of Children of the Enemy: Oral Histories of Vietnamese Amerasians and Their Mothers]]>
"With great compassion, with a firm conviction in the redeeming power of love and forgiveness, and with the consummate skill of a great story-teller, Nguyen Phan Que Mai weaves us into the lives, past and present, of those called "the dust of life"--the ostracized, mixed-race children of American soldiers; their mothers, compelled by war into prostitution, and their fathers, the G.I.'s who abandoned them and yet remained haunted by them."
--Professor Wayne Karlin, author of Wandering Souls: Journeys with the Deadand the Living in Viet Nam]]>
Library Journal (starred review)]]>
Publishers Weekly]]>
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