International Authors Book Club

Read an author of your choosing from a predetermined country. January's nation is Vietnam.

We will meet each third Thursday of the month to discuss your author, their works, and any themes they explore. 

To get you started, check out our list of a few literary award-winning Vietnamese-born authors with some details about them. The bolded fiction titles are available through your Santa Fe Public Library.

For disability accommodations, please contact a Programs Manager for SFPL at 505-955-6786 or 505-955-2817.

Lan Cao, author of Monkey Bridge and The Lotus and the Storm

Monkey Bridge is part coming-of-age story, part immigration story, part war story and part mother-daughter story set both in the Mekong Delta and Virginia. Monkey Bridge has been widely adopted in high schools and colleges, in courses such as AP English, comparative literature, women's studies, Vietnam War studies, and cultural studies.

Lin Dinh, author of Love Like Hate, Blood and Soap, Fake House and Night, Again

He is the author of two collections of stories, Fake House and Blood and Soap, and five books of poems. His first novel, Love Like Hate, was published in October 2010 and won the Balcones Fiction Prize. Blood and Soap was named one of the best books of 2004 by The Village Voice. All titles available as ebooks.

Phan Que Mai Nguyen, author of The Mountains Sing, The Secret of Hoa San and Dust Child

The Hanoi resident is the author of 12 books of poetry, fiction and non-fiction in Vietnamese and English. She started her writing career with poetry in Vietnamese and has been honored with some of the top literary awards in Vietnam. She worked as a street vendor and rice farmer before winning a scholarship to attend university in Australia before returning home to start her writing career.

Dust Child centers on the Amerasian experience – children born to Vietnamese mothers and American military fathers. Like The Mountains Sing, Dust Child (2024) has received international critical acclaim.

Viet Thanh Nguyen, author of The Sympathizer, its sequel The Committed and The Refugees

Nguyen was born in Ban Me Thuot, Viet Nam. In 1975, he came to the United States as a refugee with his family.

The winner of the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for his debut The Sympathizer, as well as seven other awards, his writings are often compared to the works of Graham Greene and Saul Bellow.

In The Sympathizer, the narrator, a communist double agent, is a "man of two minds," a half-French, half-Vietnamese army captain who arranges to come to America after the Fall of Saigon, and while building a new life with other Vietnamese refugees in Los Angeles is secretly reporting back to his communist superiors in Vietnam.

Bao Ninh, author of The Sorrow of War and Hanoi at Midnight: Stories

After 30 years, the Ho Chi Minh City resident’s latest work was translated into English.  Hanoi at Midnight: Stories is Ninh's first book-length work since The Sorrow of War, which catapulted him to fame and which was banned in Vietnam until 2006.

Polluted rivers and streams, the war-torn sky, pungent air filled with the stench of decomposing human corpses, and the deafening roar of helicopters and bombers hovering in the gloom dominate the settings of Bao Ninh's stories. Hanoi at Midnight: Stories (available as an ebook) delineates the complex outpourings of war and the way it remakes human relationships.

Kim Thuy, author of Em

A portrait of Vietnamese identity emerges that is wholly remarkable, honed in wartime violence that borders on genocide, and then by the ingenuity, sheer grit and intelligence of Vietnamese-Americans, Vietnamese-Canadians and other Vietnamese former refugees who go on to build some of the most powerful small business empires in the world.

Em is a poetic story steeped in history, about those most impacted by the violence and their later accomplishments. Available as an ebook. in Spanish and in French, this is perhaps Thuy's most personal book, the one in which she trusts her readers enough to share with them not only the pervasive love she feels but also the rage and the horror at what she and so many other children of the Vietnam War had to live through.

Ocean Vuong, author of Night Sky with Exit Wounds, Time is a Mother and On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous

Vuong is the author of the critically acclaimed poetry collections Night Sky with Exit Wounds and Time is a Mother, as well as the New York Times bestselling debut novel On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous. The 2019 novel is a letter from a son to a mother who cannot read. Written when the speaker, Little Dog, is in his late twenties, the letter unearths a family's history that began before he was born -- a history whose epicenter is rooted in Vietnam -- and serves as a doorway into parts of his life his mother has never known, all of it leading to an unforgettable revelation.