Khanh Ha

“Sharp and haunting . . . a profound sense of alienation born of a personal identity split by war. A compelling addition to the literature of the Vietnam War.” ▬ KIRKUS STARRED REVIEW

 

 

 

When a former intelligence officer is imprisoned in a communist reeducation camp, he must navigate years of forced labor, betrayal, and solitude. His attempts to escape lead only to deeper loss, and by the time he is released, his family has long fled to America, leaving him to confront the ruins of a life he no longer recognizes. At once brutal and poetic, this novel illuminates the quiet resilience of the human spirit and asks what remains when everything else has been stripped away.

 

 

“Extraordinarily skilled at prose compression, Ha writes short stories where a sentence often does the work of a page. On this level, Ha gives us a masterclass in building tension but realist in detail in the way it calibrates mystery and anxiety whilst full of the echoes of what might have been.”
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