![]() ![]() The narrative, which spans three decades, from 1978 to 2005, and alternates between Hương, a young woman who was forced to leave Vietnam, and her two sons, Tuấn, aged 6, and Bình, who was born at a refugee camp in Singapore and is just a baby by the time they relocate to New Orleans. “How much could they remember? There must have been a limit, a moment of transition when they were more American than Vietnamese, and there was no going back.” These moments do not always reveal crucial aspects of their identities and or experiences but they do succeed in giving us a crystal-clear snapshot of a particular moment in their lives. In a similar fashion to Chloe Benjamin’s The Immortalists and Ann Patchett’s Commonwealth, Eric Nguyen’s novel does not adopt the traditional structure that characterises family sagas (which usually offer an all-encompassing view of a family), honing in instead on specific periods of her characters’ lives. ![]() Subtle yet deeply evocative Things We Lost to the Water is a novel about belonging and displacement. “How unrecognizable America had made them, she was thinking, all of them.” ![]()
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