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A Novel
by Vu Tran
Book Reviewed by:A thrilling and cinematic work of sophisticated suspense and haunting lyricism, set in motion by characters who can neither trust each other nor trust themselves.
Robert, an Oakland cop, still can't let go of Suzy, the enigmatic Vietnamese wife who left him two years ago. Now she's disappeared from her new husband, Sonny, a violent Vietnamese smuggler and gambler who's blackmailing Robert into finding her for him. As he pursues her through the sleek and seamy gambling dens of Las Vegas, shadowed by Sonny's sadistic son, "Junior," and assisted by unexpected and reluctant allies, Robert learns more about his ex-wife than he ever did during their marriage. He finds himself chasing the ghosts of her past, one that reaches back to a refugee camp in Malaysia after the fall of Saigon, as his investigation soon uncovers the existence of an elusive packet of her secret letters to someone she left behind long ago. Although Robert starts illuminating the dark corners of Suzy's life, the legacy of her sins threatens to immolate them all.
Vu Tran has written a thrilling and cinematic work of sophisticated suspense and haunting lyricism, set in motion by characters who can neither trust each other nor trust themselves. This remarkable debut is a noir page-turner resonant with the lasting reverberations of lives lost and lives remade a generation ago.
In all her moral complexities, Suzy is a boldly imagined protagonist, not easily likeable but deeply human just the same. That we learn about Suzy solely through memories pieced together by others and end up caring about her as deeply as we do, is testament to Tran’s remarkable craftsmanship. By effortlessly moving a noir story beyond the confines of its genre, he proves he is a writer to watch...continued
Full Review
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(Reviewed by Poornima Apte).
In Dragonfish, Suzy writes about leaving Vietnam with her daughter, and arriving on an island before finally being resettled in the United States. She was one of many boat people, and this aspect of the story might well be modeled after Vu Tran's real-life experiences where he and most of his family were refugees at Pulau Bidong before passage to Oklahoma. It was only in Oklahoma that Tran met his father for the first time.
Situated off the northeast coast of Malaysia, Pulau Bidong (pulau means island in Malay) was largely uninhabited until shortly after the fall of Saigon in April 1975 (see Beyond the Book for The Sympathizer) when the first refugees from Vietnam, a boatload of 47 people, made the hazardous 700 mile trip across the...
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If you liked Dragonfish, try these:
by Amulya Malladi
Published 2023
Meet Gabriel Præst, an ex-Copenhagen cop (who dresses with panache), jazz aficionado, and relentless pursuer of truth as he explores Denmark's Nazi-collaborator past and anti-Muslim present in a page-turning Nordic murder mystery with a cosmopolitan vibe
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Viet Thanh Nguyen's The Sympathizer was one of the most widely and highly praised novels of 2015. Nguyen's next fiction book, The Refugees, is a collection of perfectly formed stories written over a period of twenty years, exploring questions of immigration, identity, love, and family.
A classic is a book that has never finished saying what it has to say
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Dinaw Mengestu, author of All Our Names
Vu Tran's Dragonfish is that rare hybrid marvel - a literary thriller, a narrative of migration and loss that upends the conventions of any form.
