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A Novel
by Cecile Pin
There are the goodbyes and then the fishing out of the bodies―everything in between is speculation.
After the last American troops leave Vietnam, siblings Anh, Minh, and Thanh journey to Hong Kong with the promise that their parents and younger siblings will soon follow. But when tragedy strikes, the three children are left orphaned, and sixteen-year-old Anh becomes the caretaker for her two younger brothers overnight.
In the years that follow, Anh and her brothers immigrate to the UK, living first in overcrowded camps and resettlement centers and then, later, in a modernizing London plagued by social inequality. Anh works in a factory to pay the bills. Minh loiters about with fellow high school dropouts. Thanh, the youngest, plays soccer with his friends after class. As they mature, each sibling reckons with survivor's guilt, unmoored by their parents' absence. And with every choice, their paths diverge further, until it's unclear if love alone can keep them together.
Told through lyrical narrative threads, historical research, voices from lost family, and notes by an unnamed narrator determined to chart these siblings' fates, Wandering Souls captures the lives of a family marked by loss yet relentless in the pursuit of a better future. With urgency and precision, it affirms that the most important stories are those we claim for ourselves, establishing Cecile Pin as a masterful new literary voice.
"A tender and rigorous debut from the new Didion of the Asian diaspora." ―Kirkus Reviews
"With concision and clarity, the author shows a deep understanding of how upheaval can splinter families." ―Publishers Weekly
"Wandering Souls is a poignant saga with its grieving, beating heart firmly in the right place, and heralds the arrival of an ambitious and promising new talent." ―The Guardian
"Wandering Souls is more than a story of sacrifice and familial duty. The author has greater ambitions, first signaled in the intricate story structure she builds... . What emerges is something special―a polyvocal novel, an essay on inherited trauma and a quiet metafiction about telling stories we don't own." ―New York Times Book Review
"A debut in name only, Wandering Souls is an astute and sure-footed excavation of family, selfhood, and loss in the shadow of colonial violence. It is also a deeply humane and genre-defying work of love and uncompromising hope through a long-overdue portrayal of Vietnamese life in the UK. A mighty achievement." ―Ocean Vuong, New York Times bestselling author of On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous and Time is a Mother
"I raced through it. Beautiful, brilliant, unflinching―it deals with family trauma in a way I've been trying to figure out my entire career." ―R. F. Kuang, New York Times bestselling author of Babel
This information about Wandering Souls 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.
Cecile Pin grew up in Paris and New York City. She moved to London at eighteen to study philosophy at University College London and received an MA at King's College London. She is a 2021 London Writers Award winner. Wandering Souls is her first novel and was long-listed for the Women's Prize for Fiction and the Prix Femina étranger.
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