Short – but far from sweet

Like his Pulitzer Prize-winning first novel, The Sympathisers, the stories in Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The Refugees are set largely among the Vietnamese diaspora on the west coast of America, where Nguyen himself lives, having fled to the US from Vietnam with his family in 1975. They mostly feature characters juggling the lives they’ve made in their adopted culture with their memories of — and loyalties to — the old land. In one story, set in the Reagan era, a penny-pinching woman who runs her family’s New Saigon grocery store is reluctantly moved to donate money to the futile guerrilla war against communism back in Vietnam. In another, a young refugee, newly arrived in San Francisco in the 1970s, struggles with his homosexuality; the letter he’s writing to his family in Vietnam is as self-censored as the one his father has written to him under the eye of the Party. These are nuanced, small-scale human dramas made richer by their wider political contexts.