Dorset Libraries – Virtual author talk in conversation with Dr Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai
Event WebsiteDr Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai is an award-winning writer in both Vietnamese and English. Her eight books of poetry, short fiction and non-fiction in Vietnamese have received some of Vietnam’s top literary awards.
Her debut novel and first book in English, The Mountains Sing, is an International Bestseller. The 2020 Lannan Literary Award Fellowship said “it is a work of exceptional quality” and for “contribution to peace and reconciliation”, among others.
One family, two generations of women and a war that will change their lives forever
Hà Nội, 1972. As war breaks out in Việt Nam, twelve-year-old Hương clings to her grandmother in an improvised shelter as American bombs fall around them. For her grandmother, the experience is horribly familiar. This is a woman who knows what it takes to hold a family together as a country crumbles. And now, coming of age in a nation rocked by conflict, Hương must do the same.
With the epic sweep of Min Jin Lee’s Pachinko and the haunting beauty of Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner, The Mountains Sing tells the enveloping, multigenerational tale of the Trần family. This stirring portrait of their fight to survive is intimate, lyrical and bursting with life.