The Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist (The Sympathizer) sets most of the stories in his first collection in the Vietnamese immigrant communities in California. A ghost writer brutalized during her family’s escape from Vietnam by boat is visited by the spectre of the brother who tried to protect her. A schoolboy whose parents run the New Saigon Market in San Jose witnesses his mother’s struggle to put the past behind her. A professor and his wife who made it to safety by boat decades earlier are caught in a web of confusion as she realizes his mind is wandering – he calls her by another woman’s name – while he writes in his journal, “she may not know who she is anymore.” Nguyen’s characters are haunted by the past, struggling to envision a future. (Credit: Grove Press)