A Best Book of the Year according to Book Riot, the Buzz Magazines, Cosmopolitan and Reader's Digest
Four lives, entwined forever by decisions made in a time of conflict. But what happens decades later when they unexpectedly converge once more?
Trang and Quynh: sisters who leave their rural village for the bustling city of Saigon, desperate to find work to help their impoverished parents. When they take jobs as ‘ bar girls’, paid to flirt with American GIs, they must decide whether they are willing to turn their backs on the people they used to be.
Phong: one of the thousands of mixed-race children abandoned by their American fathers and Vietnamese mothers. Phong grows up surrounded by rejection, insulted as a ‘Black American imperialist’, and a ‘child of the enemy’. But he never gives up hope of finding his parents and proving he is more than a ‘bui doi’: more than the ‘dust of life’.
Dan: A former American helicopter pilot still plagued by regrets about his actions during the Việt Nam war. Now he has returned in the hope of confronting the demons that refuse to fall silent.
Set between the Việt Nam war and the present day, Dust Child is a sweeping epic of family secrets and hidden heartache, from an internationally celebrated author.
Dust Child by Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai
Born and raised in Việt Nam, Dr. Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai (pronounced ŋwiən fα:n kwey mai) is the author of the global best-selling novels The Mountains Sing and Dust Child, Winner of the BookBrowse Best Debut Award, the International Book Awards, the PEN Oakland/Josephine Miles Literary Award, the Nota Bene Prize, the Rhegium Julii Award, the Lannan Literary Award Fellowship for Fiction, as well as Runner-up for the Dayton Literary Peace Prize. She has published twelve books of poetry, fiction, and non-fiction in Vietnamese and English and has received some of the top literary prizes in Việt Nam. Her writing has been translated into more than twenty languages and has appeared in major publications, including The New York Times. Quế Mai is a translator of ten books of poetry and fiction from English into Vietnamese and vice versa. She has a PhD in creative writing from the UK's Lancaster University. She is an advocate for the rights of disadvantaged groups in Việt Nam and was named by Forbes Việt Nam as one of twenty inspiring women of 2021.