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by Quan Barry
Quan Barry's luminous fiction debut brings us the tumultuous history of modern Vietnam as experienced by a young girl born under mysterious circumstances a few years before the country's reunification, a child gifted with the otherworldly ability to hear the voices of the dead.
At the peak of the war in Vietnam, a baby girl is born along the Song Ma River on the night of the full moon. This is Rabbit, who will journey away from her destroyed village with a makeshift family thrown together by war. Here is a Vietnam we've never encountered before: through Rabbit's inexplicable but radiant intuition, we are privy to an intimate version of history, from the days of French Indochina and the World War II rubber plantations through the chaos of postwar reunification. With its use of magical realism - Rabbit's ability to "hear" the dead - the novel reconstructs a turbulent historical period through a painterly human lens. This is the moving story of one woman's struggle to unearth the true history of Vietnam while simultaneously carving out a place for herself within it.
"Starred Review. Blurring boundaries between history and invention, life and death....award-winning poet Barry's first novel is fierce, stunning, and devastating. Readers haunted by...Chang-rae Lee's A Gesture Life, and Tan Twan Eng's The Gift of Rain will revel in it." - Library Journal
"Starred Review. While Barry's beautiful, transporting novel sometimes verges on the opaque, it pays resonant tribute to the uncounted dead below the surface of a convulsed nation." - Publishers Weekly
"Barry's rich narrative entwines one personal tale with an evocative and haunting exploration of Vietnam's painful past." - Booklist
"If you've read such classic American treatments of the soldier's experience in Vietnam as Dispatches and The Things They Carried, then you might discover in She Weeps Each Time You're Born, as I did, a long-desired and indispensable companion narrative... With a deep sensory intelligence that grounds the characters in their landscape and a prose style that elevates their lives into myth, this is not only a good or moving or surprising book but an essential one." - Kevin Brockmeier, author of The Brief History of the Dead
"Quan Barry's She Weeps Each Time You're Born is lyrical, luminous, and suspenseful all at once." - Jesmyn Ward, National Book Award-winning author of Salvage the Bones
This information about She Weeps Each Time You're Born was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Born in Saigon and raised on Boston's north shore, Quan Barry is a professor of English at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and the author of four poetry books; her third book, Water Puppets, won the AWP Donald Hall Prize for Poetry and was a PEN/Open Book finalist. She has received NEA Fellowships in both fiction and poetry, and her work has appeared in such publications as Ms. and The New Yorker. Barry lives in Wisconsin.
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