'[An] absorbing, stirring novel... Que Mai contains her saga with a poet's discipline, crafting spare and unsparing sentences, and uplifts it with a poet's antenna for beauty in the most desolate circumstances. She evokes the landscape hauntingly, as a site of loss so profound it assumes the quality of fable.'
– New York Times Book Review
'The Mountains Sing is an epic account of Việt Nam’s painful 20th century history, both vast in scope and intimate in its telling. Through the travails of one family, Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai brings us close to the horrors of famine, war, and class struggle. But in this moving and riveting novel, she also shows us a post-war Việt Nam, a country of hope and renewal, home to a people who have never given up.'
– Viet Thanh Nguyen, Pulitzer Prizewinning author of The Sympathizer
'Devastating… From the French and Japanese occupations to the Indochina wars, The Great Hunger, land reform and the Vietnam War, it’s a story of resilience, determination, family and hope in a country blighted by pain.'
– Refinery29, 'Best New Books, August 2020'
'A sweeping story that positions Vietnamese life within the rich and luminous history of national epics like The Tale of Ki?u and The Iliad. Expansive in scope and feeling, The Mountains Sing is a feat of hope, an unflinchingly felt inquiry into the past, with the courageous storytelling of the present.'
– Ocean Vuong, author of On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous
'A Vietnamese poet conjures history and fate in a luminous tale that resonates across generations as one family grapples with the psychic residue of war.'
– O, The Oprah Magazine
'I learned so much that I needed to know about Vietnam… This book, first and foremost, is one of the most significant contributions to literature.'
– Natalie Jenner, author of The Jane Austen Society
'Inspired by the experiences of [Nguyen Phan Que Mai’s] own family, and backed up by extensive research, it's a testament to their endurance; a harrowing novel which finds hope in the author's faith in reconciliation and understanding.'
– Herald, Glasgow
'A luminous, complex family narrative... Que Mai [has] an astute and graceful ability to sustain contradictory truths about war, displacement, aesthetic representations, and human nature... The Mountains Sing affirms the individual’s right to think, read, and act according to a code of intuitive civility, borne out of Vietnam's fertile and compassionate cultural heritage.'
– NPR
