Things We Lost to the Water by Eric Nguyen

Things We Lost to the Water
Eric Nguyen
Page: 304
Format: pdf, ePub, mobi, fb2
ISBN: 9780593311035
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
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Overview

Notes From Your Bookseller Things We Lost to the Water is a mesmerizing debut of familial bonds, assimilation and home that centers around an immigrant Vietnamese family. Separated from her husband, Huong must figure out how to make a life for herself and her two young sons in New Orleans while coming to terms with the fact that her life will never be as she imagined. The family adapts to American life in ways that sometimes threaten to cause a rift between them, and it is only when Hurricane Katrina devastates their new home city that they find their way back to one another. A captivating novel about an immigrant Vietnamese family who settles in New Orleans and struggles to remain connected to one another as their lives are inextricably reshaped. This stunning debut is "vast in scale and ambition, while luscious and inviting … in its intimacy” (The New York Times Book Review).

When Huong arrives in New Orleans with her two young sons, she is jobless, homeless, and worried about her husband, Cong, who remains in Vietnam. As she and her boys begin to settle in to life in America, she continues to send letters and tapes back to Cong, hopeful that they will be reunited and her children will grow up with a father.

But with time, Huong realizes she will never see her husband again. While she attempts to come to terms with this loss, her sons, Tuan and Binh, grow up in their absent father's shadow, haunted by a man and a country trapped in their memories and imaginations. As they push forward, the three adapt to life in America in different ways: Huong gets involved with a Vietnamese car salesman who is also new in town; Tuan tries to connect with his heritage by joining a local Vietnamese gang; and Binh, now going by Ben, embraces his adopted homeland and his burgeoning sexuality. Their search for identity—as individuals and as a family—threatens to tear them apart, un­til disaster strikes the city they now call home and they are suddenly forced to find a new way to come together and honor the ties that bind them.

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