Description
‘Dazzling. Sharply drawn and hauntingly beautiful.’ Elif Shafak, author of The Island of Missing Trees
Four lives, entwined forever by decisions made in a time of conflict. But what happens decades later when they unexpectedly converge once more?
‘Dust Child is satisfying, lyrical, and deeply empathetic. Nguyen Phan Que Mai is a born storyteller.’ Gabrielle Zevin, author of Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow
Trang and Quynh: sisters who leave their rural village for the bustling city of Saigon, desperate to find work to help their impoverished parents. When they take jobs as ‘ bar girls’, paid to flirt with American GIs, they must decide whether they are willing to turn their backs on the people they used to be.
Phong: one of the thousands of mixed-race children abandoned by their American fathers and Vietnamese mothers. Phong grows up surrounded by rejection, insulted as a ‘Black American imperialist’, and a ‘child of the enemy’. But he never gives up hope of finding his parents and proving he is more than a ‘bui doi’: more than the ‘dust of life’.
