Washoe County Library System

“Beautiful and heartrending” fiction set in Vietnam and America from the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Sympathizer (Joyce Carol Oates, The New Yorker)
In these powerful stories, written over a period of twenty years and set in both Vietnam and America, Viet Thanh Nguyen paints a vivid portrait of the experiences of people leading lives between two worlds, the adopted homeland and the country of

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"From the internationally bestselling author of The Reluctant Fundamentalist and How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia, a love story that unfolds in a world being irrevocably transformed by migration. In a country teetering on the brink of civil war, two young people meet--sensual, fiercely independent Nadia and gentle, restrained Saeed. They embark on a furtive love affair, thrust into premature intimacy by the unrest roiling their city. When it...

"1955 in New York City, the city of progress. But in the Perlman residence, the past is as close as the present. Rachel Perlman, a child of Berlin and an artist bearing her mother's legacy, arrives in New York as part of the wave of Jewish Displaced persons who managed to survive the brutalities of the war. But despite her efforts, Rachel is unable to live the "normal" life of an American housewife, not until she can shake the ghosts of her past and...

With the world slowly sliding into war, enemies of the Reich flee Europe. One night in Lisbon, as a poor refugee gazes hungrily at the boat enroute to America, a man approaches with two tickets...and a story to tell. A novel about a German refuge and his wife as they flee across Europe early in World War II and wait for the ship that will take them to America.

When her happy middle-class life in Afghanistan is shattered by the rise of the Taliban and her husband's murder by fundamentalists, former schoolteacher Fereiba embarks on a high-risk effort to escape to England with her three children.

Natasha Doroshenko, a Ukrainian mail-order bride who has been convicted of the attempted murder of her Danish fiance, escapes custody on her way to an interrogation in Copenhagen's police headquarters. That night, the frozen, tortured body of the fiance is found in a car, and the manhunt for Natasha escalates. The police aren't the only ones on her trail; Natasha's past has finally caught up to her and she is being pursued by the Danish Secret Service,...

"Welcome to the not-too-distant future: Japan, having vanished from the face of the earth, is now remembered as "the land of sushi." Hiruko, its former citizen and a climate refugee herself, has a job teaching immigrant children in Denmark with her invented language Panska (Pan-Scandinavian): "homemade language. no country to stay in. three countries I experienced. insufficient space in brain. so made new language. homemade language." As she searches...