The metro shudders to a halt: an unattended bag has been found, and terrorism is suspected. For the narrator, a young Vietnamese woman teaching English in the Parisian suburbs, time stops. Her son falls asleep on her shoulder and a long interior monologue begins, looking back over her life thus far.

From a constrained childhood in post-communist Hanoi, to a period of study in '80's Russia, she tries to understand everything that has brought her to this point. Through it all runs her passion for Thuy, a writer who lives in Saigon's Chinatown, and who she has not seen for eleven years.

Interspersed with extracts from Thuy's novel, the narrator's monologue is an attempt, at once desperate, humorous, and self-deprecating, to fix the past once and for all and exorcise the passion that haunts her.

Winner of an English PEN Award'Chinatown is a fever dream, a hallucination, a loop in time and life that Thuan masterfully deploys to capture the disorienting and debilitating effects of migration, racism, and a broken heart in both Vietnam and France. I was completely immersed in this spellbinding novel' - Viet Thanh Nguyen.

An exquisite and intense journey through the labyrinths of Hanoi, Leningrad, and Paris-through dreams, memory, and loss.

About the Author
Thuan was born in 1967 in Hanoi. She studied at Pyatigorsk University (Russia) and at la Sorbonne in Paris. She is the author of ten novels and a recipient of the Writers' Union Prize, the highest award in Vietnamese literature. 7 of her novels were translated and published in France. 'Chinatown', her debut novel in English, won a PEN Translates Award, the 2023 ALTA National Translation Award, and was shortlisted for the 2023 Republic of Consciousness Prize. She currently lives in Paris. NGUYEN AN LY lives in Hochiminh City. She has over 20 translations into Vietnamese, published under various names and in various genres, including authors such as Margaret Atwood, Donna Tartt, Kazuo Ishiguro, Richard Flanagan, J. L. Borges, and the poetry in The Lord of the Rings. As an editor, she has worked on translations from Nabokov, A. S. Byatt, Roland Barthes, Joseph Campbell, Viet Thanh Nguyen and Liu Cixin, among others. Chinatown by Thuan, her debut translation into English, won an English PEN Translates Award and the 2023 ALTA National Translation Award in Prose. She co-founds and co-edits the independent online Zzz Review.

Awards
Short-listed for ALTA National Translation Award 2023 and Republic of Consciousness Prize 2023.



Book Information
ISBN 9781911284673
Author Thuan
Format Paperback
Page Count 192
Imprint Tilted Axis Press
Publisher Tilted Axis Press