*** WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE FOR FICTION 2016***
WINNER OF THE EDGAR AWARD FOR BEST FIRST NOVEL 2016
WINNER OF THE CARNEGIE MEDAL FOR EXCELLENCE IN FICTION 2016

A fierce novel written in a refreshingly high style and charged with intelligent rage Financial Times

It is April 1975, and Saigon is in chaos. At his villa, a general of the South Vietnamese army is drinking whiskey and, with the help of his trusted captain, drawing up a list of those who will be given passage aboard the last flights out of the country. The general and his compatriots start a new life in Los Angeles, unaware that one among their number, the captain, is secretly observing and reporting on the group to a higher-up in the Viet Cong. The Sympathizer is the story of this captain: a man brought up by an absent French father and a poor Vietnamese mother, a man who went to university in America, but returned to Vietnam to fight for the Communist cause. A gripping spy novel, an astute exploration of extreme politics, and a moving love story, The Sympathizer explores a life between two worlds and examines the legacy of the Vietnam War in literature, film, and the wars we fight today.


A bold, artful and globally minded reimagining of the Vietnam war . . . The Sympathizer is an excellent literary novel, and one that ends, with unsettling present-day resonance, in a refugee boat where opposing ideas about intentions, actions and their consequences take stark and resilient human form the Guardian

Beautifully written and meaty
Claire Messud

[A] remarkable debut novel . . . In its final chapters, The Sympathizer becomes an absurdist tour de force that might have been written by a Kafka or Genet
New York Times

This debut is a page-turner (read: everybody will finish) that makes you reconsider the Vietnam War ... Nguyens darkly comic novel offers a point of view about American culture that weve rarely seen
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