JUNE 2021 - AudioFile
Narrator Quyen Ngo lends her powerful voice to this debut fiction on the refugee experience. Huong and her family escape to the U.S. from Vietnam in 1978, but her husband, Công, gets left behind. She tells her children that Công is dead, but when one of them finds out the truth years later, the betrayal creates distance between them. Narrating from multiple perspectives, Ngo fervently recounts the family members’ inner struggles as they adjust to their new lives in New Orleans. Her portrayals of the characters are splendid, but her delivery of narrative sometimes fails to hold one’s interest. Nonetheless, her performance adds an even stronger human element to the story. Listeners will be moved. A.C. © AudioFile 2021, Portland, Maine
Publishers Weekly
03/29/2021
Nguyen’s captivating debut spans three decades to chronicle the lives of a Vietnamese refugee family. In 1978, Hư ơ ng arrives in New Orleans with her two sons, five-year-old Tuấ n and infant Bì nh. They settle in the Versailles Arms project on the eastern outskirts of the city, where the hurricane alarm reminds Hương of the war, and she mails tape recordings to Cô ng, the husband she left behind. Her messages receive no reply until finally, in a terse postcard, Công urges her to forget him. Hương tells her sons their father died, and over the years, the boys grow to follow different paths. In 1991, Tuấn falls in with a Vietnamese gang, the Southern Boyz. The next summer, Bình, who insists everyone call him Ben, takes refuge in books and a romance with an older white boy. A couple years later, Ben finds Hương’s old letters to Công and confronts her, shattering their increasingly fragile bond. As the characters spin away from each other, Nguyen keeps a keen eye on their struggles and triumphs, crafting an expansive portrayal of New Orleans’s Vietnamese community under the ever-present threat of flooding, and the novel builds to a haunting conclusion during Hurricane Katrina. Readers will find this gripping and illuminating. Agent: Julie Stevenson, Massie & McQuilkin. (May)
From the Publisher
One of President Obama's Favorite Books of the Year • Winner of the Crook's Corner Book Prize for best debut novel set in the American South • Longlisted for the Aspen Words Literary Prize • A Christian Science Monitor Best Book of the Year • An Atlanta Journal Constitution Top 10 Southern Book of the Year • A Chicago Public Library Best Book of the Year • Named one of the “Fifteen Books to Watch for” by The New York Times
“Nguyen’s narrative strikes a very elusive balance: vast in scale and ambition, while luscious and inviting — enchanting, really — in its intimacy.”
—Bryan Washington, The New York Times Book Review
“Eric Nguyen’s masterful debut novel Things We Lost to the Water is a deeply engaging, heart-rending look at a family of Vietnamese refugees struggling to survive and how the choices they make as individuals have ripple effects on each other.”
—Suzanne Van Atten, Atlanta Journal-Constitution
"Things We Lost to the Water introduces an exquisite new voice in author Eric Nguyen; his debut novel is a luminous, balletic portrayal of an immigrant Vietnamese family in the US . . . Nguyen navigates their multiple perspectives with dexterity and emotional clarity, aching but never maudlin. I loved every page."
—Arianna Rebolini, BuzzFeed
“Powerfully written . . . This is a compelling and poignant debut novel . . . Achingly beautiful . . . A highly recommended read!”
—Helen Vernier, San Francisco Book Review
“Nguyen traces the family’s struggles alongside fellow refugees, complicated friendships, dangerous street gangs and difficult first loves, but the story is more than a by-the-book bildungsroman. By shifting points of view throughout the novel, Nguyen . . . weaves the everyday challenges of growing up with the unique pressures of overcoming the traumas of war.”
—Christina Leo, inRegister Magazine
“Things We Lost to the Water, the first novel from Eric Nguyen, is exactly the kind of rare treasure that readers are going to feel lucky to have uncovered.”
—Steven Whitten, The Anniston Star
“One book to take special note of this month: Things We Lost to the Water, Eric Nguyen’s debut novel. Nguyen’s story spans three decades and chronicles the lives of a Vietnamese refugee family who flee to the U.S. Things We Lost to the Water is a lustrous portrait of first and second-generation immigrant life in America — full of joy, sorrow, secrets, and deceits — and showcases one family’s desire to survive in life and with each other.”
—Jordan Snow, Apartment Therapy
“I was captivated. The writing is absolutely gorgeous . . . The voice is strong and this is a powerful novel . . . Well worth a read. Really enjoyed.”
—Roxane Gay, via Goodreads
“This is an elemental book, of water, for sure, but also of other elements of life, including love and loss. Vietnamese people know all about these elements, coming from a country whose entire length is bordered by a sea, and from a history saturated with loss. Love is one element that has enabled their survival, but sometimes at a cost. Eric Nguyen’s powerful novel ripples and gleams with the unpredictable flow and surge of love, which, like water, can drown us or sustain us. From a war to a hurricane, from an ocean to a flood, Things We Lost to the Water proves itself to be a novel that sustains us.”
—Viet Thanh Nguyen, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Sympathizer
“Exquisitely well-written, Things We Lost to the Water is a tender, haunting story of loss, love, family and survival. A moving and powerful debut.”
—Charles Yu, National Book Award-winning author of Interior Chinatown
“Nguyen's Things We Lost to the Water is a novel full of tenderness and courage. The family at its center hums with love and strength, and their journey to and within New Orleans brings a fresh perspective to that most iconic city. Nguyen will broaden the reader's understanding of migration, perseverance, and what it means to be American. This is exactly the sort of novel we need right now.”
—Kawai Strong Washburn, author of Sharks in the Time of Saviors
What a book! Eric Nguyen has written one of the best debut novels in years. In precise, exquisite sentences, Nguyen details the emotional lives of three family members over decades of struggle, survival, joy. Things We Lost to the Water is a masterpiece, an arrival, an expression of love, from a beautiful and necessary new voice.
—Matthew Salesses, author of The Hundred-Year Flood
“A devastatingly beautiful debut novel of secrets, deceits, and survivals. An extraordinary tale of a mother and her two sons, torn apart by the storms of Vietnam, to be tested again by the hurricanes of New Orleans. The end has me weeping from joy, sorrow and hope. Eric Nguyen’s talent radiates via his urgent prose and his ability to sketch the fine line between loyalty and betrayal, between what brings us together and what breaks us apart. Things We Lost to the Water is a powerful, stunning, and necessary read!”
—Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai, author of The Mountains Sing
In Things We Lost to the Water, Eric Nguyen not only uses water to great effect but the prose itself feels like water: clear, powerful, and life-giving. While reading we believe that being loved and being flawed are not incompatible, nor belonging and being estranged. Nguyen helps us understand that we can all float if we let go of having to swim the same way to the same rhythm—we will find our own level in our own time. This is a beautiful book!
—Nicola Griffith, author of Hild
"Moving . . . Deft."
—May-lee Chai, Minneapolis Star Tribune
“While the story arc might sound familiar—other-side-of-the-world refugees who endure challenging lives in the U.S.—Nguyen’s gentle precision nevertheless produces an extraordinary debut with undeniable resonance.”
—Terry Hong, Booklist (starred)
“Debut author Nguyen movingly portrays the way adopted homes can become as cherished and familiar as ancestral ones . . . but also the truth that new loves can never quite heal old wounds . . . An engrossing, prismatic portrait of first- and second-generation Vietnamese American life.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“Nguyen’s captivating debut spans three decades to chronicle the lives of a Vietnamese refugee family . . . Nguyen keeps a keen eye on their struggles and triumphs, crafting an expansive portrayal of New Orleans’s Vietnamese community under the ever-present threat of flooding, and the novel builds to a haunting conclusion during Hurricane Katrina. Readers will find this gripping and illuminating.”
—Publishers Weekly
JUNE 2021 - AudioFile
Narrator Quyen Ngo lends her powerful voice to this debut fiction on the refugee experience. Huong and her family escape to the U.S. from Vietnam in 1978, but her husband, Công, gets left behind. She tells her children that Công is dead, but when one of them finds out the truth years later, the betrayal creates distance between them. Narrating from multiple perspectives, Ngo fervently recounts the family members’ inner struggles as they adjust to their new lives in New Orleans. Her portrayals of the characters are splendid, but her delivery of narrative sometimes fails to hold one’s interest. Nonetheless, her performance adds an even stronger human element to the story. Listeners will be moved. A.C. © AudioFile 2021, Portland, Maine
Kirkus Reviews
2021-01-27
In this decades-spanning novel, a family of Vietnamese refugees makes a home in New Orleans.
Hương, who’s pregnant, arrives in New Orleans in 1978 disoriented and overwhelmed but clear on one thing: She must get in touch with Công, her husband, who was inexplicably left behind when she and their young son boarded the boat that carried them away from Vietnam and the encroaching Communist regime. As she, her son, and her new baby settle into the Versailles Arms, an apartment building on a polluted bayou populated entirely by Vietnamese refugees, she sends letter after letter to their old addresses in Vietnam and constantly replays the moment of their unexpected parting in her head. “How had Công’s hand slipped?she kept asking herself. That was the only explanation. The only possible one.” It’s only when Công sends her a brief postcard back—“Please don’t contact me again” is the jist of it—that denial gives way to grief and a steely resolve to protect her two sons, no matter what. Over the following years, the novel moves fluidly among each of the family members’ perspectives: Tuấn, her elder son, grows from a boy gentle with animals to a teenager trying to prove his toughness to the members of a Vietnamese American gang called the Southern Boyz. Bình—or Ben, as he insists on being called, never having known Vietnam—loves to read, slowly realizes that he’s gay, and eventually embarks on a transoceanic voyage of his own. Hương begins dating a kind car salesman named Vinh, but all three family members are haunted by Công’s absence. Hương tells the boys early on that their father is dead, a lie that plants the seeds for familial rupture later on. Debut author Nguyen movingly portrays the way adopted homes can become as cherished and familiar as ancestral ones (Hương on New Orleans: “She realized this had become her city, the place she lived but also a place that lived in her”) but also the truth that new loves can never quite heal old wounds. Seeing her sons, so like their father, growing away from her, Hương thinks: “It’s always like she’s losing him again—to the world, to life, to fate.”
An engrossing, prismatic portrait of first- and second-generation Vietnamese American life.
