The Sorrow of War

Bao Ninh

This is the semi-autobiographical account of a soldier's experiences. The hero of the story, Kien, is a captain. After 10 years of war and months as an MIA body-collector, Kien suffers a nervous breakdown in Hanoi as he tries to re-establish a relationship with his former sweetheart.

Music through the dark

Bree Lafreniere

A record of the Cambodian soul, taking readers into the heart of a horrifying tragedy - one that claimed the lives of Daran Kravanh's parents and seven siblings and as many as three million other Cambodians. Daran's talent for playing the accordion saved his own life.

The Quiet American

Graham Greene

Into the intrigue and violence of Indo-China comes Pyle, a young idealistic American sent to promote democracy through a mysterious "Third Force". As his naive optimism starts to cause bloodshed, his friend Fowler, a cynical foreign correspondent, finds it hard to stand aside and watch.

Novel without a name

Duong Thu Huong

In 1991, after sending abroad a manuscript of her Novel Without a Name - the first novel by a northern veteran to chronicle wide spread disillusionment with the war effort and party leadership, Huong was imprisoned for seven months without trial.

This is a piercing and unfogettable tale of the horror and spiritual weariness of war narrated by Quan, a North Vietnamese soldier of the people, who joined the army at the age of eighteen full of idealism for the Communist Party and its cause of national liberation.

'An extraordinary and profoundly tragic novel... it is Duong Thu Huong's vision and its resonant imagery that makes this book a work of art' Boston Sunday Globe

Paradise of the Blind

Duong Thu Huong

Duong Thu Huong is a veteran who spent ten years in the tunnels and air raid shelters of central Vietnam, the most heavily bomber area of her country. Huong emerged after the Vietnam war as one of the most widely read and celebrated novelists of her generation. But when her best selling novel Paradise of the Blind scandalized the party authorities in 1988 by depicting the disastrous, maoist style 1953-1956 land reform, Huong was publicly criticised and the work suddenly withdrawn from circulation. Again, like her hero, Duong Thu Huong found herself transformed overnight from patriot to pariah.Huong has not been allowed to publish any of her books in Vietnam since then.