A great and powerful Vietnamese story told by a young promising author that I can not wait to read what she writes next.

Now shortlisted for the Waterstone’s Debut Fiction Prize. this story is heart breaking and tragic. it was times i had to take a break. i cant imagine being taken from my home and left to refugee camps at 13-10 years old. be in the right state of mind to read this one.

Bit of a mixed bag, this one. Yes, strong on the impact of trauma on the second generation (though hardly a new topic). Persuasive first person account of the obligation of the oldest child, a girl, to stand in loco parentis. But elsewhere it’s sketchy. Secondary characters are left unfleshed, notably brother Minh and husband Tom. The Vietnamese background is interesting in parts, again sketchy in others.
A reasonable effort but not a ground breaker.

Wandering Souls by Cecile Pin is a uniquely formatted and lyrically narrated historical fiction about three Vietnamese siblings, Anh, Thanh, and Minh, and their resettlement in the United Kingdom after their family fled during the Vietnam War. Their story takes them from the boats fleeing Vietnam, to the shores of Hong Kong, the refugee resettlement camps in rural England and finally to their “council housing” in London. We appreciated that this was a novel about Vietnamese immigrants in the UK, which provided a different perspective than the ones we typically read about resettlement in America. While this book was a beautiful debut novel and there were many aspects we loved, we also wished it was slightly longer to allow further character development. Despite these minor critiques, we agree this belongs on the 2023 Women’s Prize for Fiction Longlist and definitely recommend adding this one to your TBR.

Sixteen year old Anh is the oldest child of her family After the fall of Saigon, the family decides to flee Vietnam, but not together. First, Anh and her younger brothers Thanh and Minh go, her parents and other siblings will soon follow in another boat. But things go different as planned. The escape and journey by boat of Anh, Thanh and Minh arrives safely in Hong Kong, where they land in an overcrowded refugee camp. They wait there for their parents and other siblings, untill one sad day when they are informed and asked to identify bodies, bodies that belong to their parents and younger siblings, whose escape from Vietnam costs them their lives. From now on, the three siblings are completely on their own, alone in their grief and alone in their attempt to survive, and sixteen year old Anh becomes the caretaker of her younger brothers. In the following years, with the help of refugee aid programs, the three children land in the UK, where they also land in refugee and resettlement centers, and eventually get their own little place in London. In the midst of the Tatcher era where refugees are not welcomed very friendly. Anh starts to work in a clothing factory, while her brothers are at school, one succesfull and the other struggling and dropping out of school. Meanwhile, the reader also gets to know what one other little brother, Dao, who perished at sea sees from above as some kind of spirit thinks of it all and how he looks at his siblings from another point. This truly gave the book another layer, and it already is a very gripping and moving story.
I was truly moved by this book, which tells the realistic story of so many Vietnamese boat refugees, a story that still is actual. It truly was heartbreaking when the three young children get to hear that their family didn't survive their boat journey, and it was just so difficult for the three of them to pick up their live again. With every book about Vietnamese boat people that I read ( and I have read quite a lot of books about this topic ) my already deep respect for them grows even more. How they where threated in the UK by Thatcher, who promised a lot, but just heartless worked against the plight of theVietnamese boat people documents showed later, just gave me the cold chills and you truly wonder why Tatcher made these kind of decisions.

This book is just moving, revealing, and written beautifully and it is a book I recommend

First of all, I would like to thank Henry Holt and Co. for providing a digital copy of this novel via NetGalley. This really worked as a gripping piece of historical fiction. It tells the story of three siblings who must come to terms with the loss of their parents as well as moving to a new country. They face alot of hardship and we see the characters develop from these situations. There is plenty of variety in the writing, with chapters that feel from a history text as well as chapters told from the perspective of a ghost. I found the latter to be a particular bold choice that lead to an emotional payoff at the end. I highly recommend this story.

A story that is so lyrically written a story of family of three siblings who lost the rest of their family escaping Vietnam to start a new life in the Uk.Their story their struggles were so haunting so moving it reads like a true story even though it’s fiction.This book will stay with me it’s sadness it’s beautiful writing.#netgalley #henryholt

This book follows the story of a Vietnamese family in the 1980s on their journey to try and get to America. This is a short book but really packs a bunch with multiple points of view and spans decades. I found it a really interesting slice of history that I've never read about before. I also liked the unique perspectives, one of which is a spirit or I guess you could say a "wandering soul." However, I did think some parts went over my head, which is often the case with literary fiction books. I could see myself rereading it and getting more out of it.

Three years after American troops leave Vietnam,
a Vietnamese family plans their leave to go to America where they have relatives. The start of their journey takes them on two separate boats to Hong Kong .. the first boat to leave carries Anh 16 and her 13 and 10 yr old brothers. ..the parents and four siblings will follow later on another boat.
Anh and her brothers are the only three that make it.. an awful tragedy happens to the rest of their family.
This is the children’s story of how they grow up and its far from the life that the parents planned when they left their homeland.
This was a great debut.

Thank you to Netgalley and Henry Holt & Company for the ARC!

* This should have been marketed as YA. There is a lot of telling instead of showing, and the details are concrete and without nuance. The disjointed chapters come off as trendy and gimmicky. While the material is informative, there are many refugee stories currently available, and as an adult read, this one falls short.

Thank you to Cecile Pin, Henry Holt & Co., and NetGalley for an advance reader copy in exchange for an honest review.

Published by Henry Holt and Co. on March 21, 2023

Wandering Souls is the story of a refugee family. It begins with a physical journey from Vietnam to England and ends as a life journey brings a refugee into late middle age.

Thi Ahn is one of the Vietnamese boat people who made it to Hong Kong. Her father’s plan was to divide the family, sending Ahn and her brothers Thanh and Minh first, followed by her parents, her two younger sisters, a baby brother and her brother Dao. Ahn’s boat arrives in Hong Kong after a brief encounter with Thai pirates who traffic in women. Her other family members drown when the boat that ferries them capsizes. Ahn learns their fate a few weeks after her arrival in Hong Kong when she is asked to identify their bodies. At sixteen, she becomes the guardian of her younger brothers.

While the story is primarily told from Ahn’s perspective, Dao occasionally chimes in with his concerns about Ahn and his other living siblings. Whether dead people should voice their thoughts as characters in a novel is, I suppose, a question of taste. I’m not a fan. I want dead people to keep their opinions to themselves, particularly their opinions of me which, I must assume, are unlikely to be favorable. Turning ghosts into characters makes me uncomfortable. Maybe it’s a personal problem, as chatty spirits are a common literary device.

My literary preferences notwithstanding, it makes sense in the context of the novel that Dao would comment from the afterlife on the observations he makes of his siblings. Dao is one of the wandering souls that give the book its title. I’m not sure it makes sense that his commentary would so often take the form of poetry, but who knows how ghosts communicate?

Dao's appearances contrast with American veterans of the Vietnam War who enter the story to express their remorse for setting up sound systems to disturb the souls of dead Vietnamese soldiers. Vietnamese cultural traditions/ superstitions teach that souls of the dead are condemned to wander until they have been buried in native soil. Disturbing their souls is meant as a form of psychological warfare. Dao is presumably wandering because his body washed up in Hong Kong, far from his homeland.

The understated story is largely free of drama, apart from the tragedy that turns Ahn and her brothers into orphaned refugees. Cecile Pin conveys Ahn’s fears but gives little attention to the atmosphere in the refugee camps in Hong Kong and England. Ahn has an uncle in New Haven but, not wanting to be around living relatives when much of her immediate family is dead, Ahn doesn’t mention him to the resettlement specialist. The US denies the family’s refugee application (likely because Ahn failed to mention her uncle) but England accepts them.

The story makes the point that each decision in a life opens a new timeline and forecloses others. Would the family have had a better life in America? The answer is unknowable. If her father had not sent the family to Hong Kong, would they all have survived in Vietnam? When Ahn flirts with guilt for abandoning her country, she is reminded that her family might have been sent to a forced labor camp if they had stayed. Each choice in a life opens a new door and closes countless others, but we never know what we would have discovered behind the doors we close.

Ahn’s siblings study English and, when Ahn turns eighteen, are granted Council housing in London. Ahn lives a life of sacrifice, taking a sewing job while her brothers attend school. One brother drops out at sixteen and begins to live a life that might be a bit shady. The other eventually makes a life of his own, although not the life he wants. Some choices are a function of opportunity and the opportunities we may desire are not always available.

Most of the story’s focus is on Ahn, whose life is narrated from the third-person. Ahn feels she has failed to raise her brothers properly, tarnishing her father’s dream that the boys would become doctors or scientists in America. Apart from letting us know what Ahn is thinking, Pin does little to give the reader a sense of the struggle that she endures. Or perhaps she isn’t struggling as she moves through the course of an average life (much of it lost to the reader in a flash forward), a life that begins in tragedy but becomes productive with the help of the Refugee Council.

The novel makes the case that helping refugees is essential. In a history lesson, we learn that Margaret Thatcher complained that giving council housing to the Vietnamese is unfair to white people. She thought Poles and Hungarians would assimilate more easily and feared that the Vietnamese would start riots. Thatcher carried on a British tradition of racism, a tradition that made British governments believe it was just fine to colonize and rule brown people around the world.

As the story nears its end, the perspective shifts to Ahn’s daughter Jane, who begins to narrate in the first person. Jane feels the weight of dead family members she never met, of human trafficking victims in Thailand of whom she has only read, of wandering souls in Vietnam during a war that ended before she was born. The reader assumes that Jane has likely been the narrator all along, a point of view that explains the sense of detachment from Ahn’s story.

The detachment is heightened by occasional pauses to teach history lessons: trafficking in Thailand, refugee statistics, Thatcher’s response to UN pressure to accept boat people into England. Pin adds academic discussions of the Iliad, transgenerational trauma, Joan Didion essays, and diverse cultural responses to death. Little of this resonates. The encounter with Thai pirates, for example, is so brief and uneventful that it creates no tension.

I sometimes had the impression that Pin was interested in showing off her breadth of knowledge, or perhaps in writing a novel that lit professors could use to illustrate various writing techniques, rather than telling an engaging story. The academic asides only enhance the feeling that we are glimpsing the story of a life that the narrator didn’t live. That narrative choice robs the story of the power it might otherwise have had.

Before the narrator’s final first-person intrusion into the story, the story wraps up with a brief return to the third-person point of view, perhaps a bit too predictably as the family contemplates their New Haven relatives and the need to give the wandering souls their rest. Trappings of a memoir round out the narrative.

Considered as a whole, Wandering Souls too often seems remote, depriving the reader of a strong connection to the characters or key events. The narrator’s detachment keeps the novel from being inspirational or truly moving, although — to be fair — not all difficult lives are inspirational or moving. At the same time, even an academic discussion of refugees in a time of crisis serves as an important reminder of lives less fortunate than those that most of us live. Simply calling attention to the boat people and the Vietnamese diaspora makes Wandering Souls worthwhile.

RECOMMENDED

This is a story of family, loss, war, memories and the lasting repercussions of war. A story of searching for a new life in a new land, not out of choice but out of necessity - if you want to continue living.

This begins as the remaining troops leave Vietnam, and follows a family who is hoping to find a new home in America, hoping to live near their father’s brother who made the move many years before. First to leave are the eldest children: Anh, Minh, and Thanh. Their parents and younger siblings will follow as soon as possible. As they wait for the rest of their family to arrive, Anh takes over most of the parental duties, although she is only sixteen.

They are placed in camps where time passes, and they wait for any news of their family. When the news arrives, it is not the news they were hoping for. Their family is now just down to three.

Eventually they immigrate to the UK, where they may live, but aren’t exactly welcomed. It is hard for Anh to find work, but she wants her brothers to go to school. Minh finds friends at school, but those friends aren’t particularly interested in attending school, and Minh follows their lead. Anh finds work in a factory, which allows them to have minimal funds for food and to pay the bills, but it isn’t an easy life. She feels the weight of responsibility. She wants more, not for herself as much as for her family, and it is crushing her.

I read this without stopping, except to highlight passages often. This is an unforgettable story, beautifully written, if often heartbreaking. Of note: this is Longlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction 2023, and I can see why. I could not, did not, put this book down until I finished the last pages.

’Knowledge allows remembering, and remembering is honoring.



Published: 21 Mar 2023

Many thanks for the ARC provided by Henry Holt & Company

I will always request books by Vietnamese writers. When they are as exceptional as this, I feel like I've won some sort of awards.

This is a beautifully told story about grief and how it carries itself from one generation to the other.

Cecile Pin is a fantastic writer and I can not wait to see what is next.

Thanks to NetGalley and the publishers for the opportunity to read and review this book.

"Knowledge allows remembering, and remembering is honoring."

I'm not one to stick closely to the daily news cycle. That being said, it has been hard to watch politicians fight over banning books and censoring history, especially as they do nothing to stop school shootings like the one that occurred this week. With so much hate and deceit in the world, it can be hard to remain hopeful. Still, our optimism must remain. How do we keep this positive outlook? I don't pretend to have the answers, but I do see plenty of things that help me maintain an enthusiastic mindset. In the book world, more and more diverse authors are telling their stories, introducing readers to a wider array of realities. Even more promising, it seems like these tales are capturing a broader audience than ever before. Add Cecile Pin's debut novel Wandering Souls into that category. She's written a searing portrait of a family's history through war, immigration, and assimilation. It is the kind of story that demands to be read. One that is powerful and poignant in its perspective.

In the years following the Vietnam War, it is clear to Anh's parents that the promises of a bright future rest outside of their home country. Anh's uncle has taken his family to live the American dream, a dream that Anh's father plans to pursue too. This is a huge, life-changing moment for the family. Anh's parents know that the journey to a better life will be as perilous as it will be rewarding. They send Anh and the other eldest children on the trip to Hong Kong first. They promise that they and the younger siblings will not be far behind. The full family will be reunited in China before embarking on the next leg of their trip. This promise, though, will not be kept. Anh's parents and younger siblings are killed during their travels, leaving the fragmented remains of the family left to journey ahead alone.

Over the next several decades, Anh and her surviving siblings are left to pick up the pieces of their father's shattered dream. They land first in a resettlement camp, a place where they interact with other immigrants, struggling to hold on to their identities. When they finally are placed back into the real world they land not in America, but in the UK. Their new home doesn't offer the bright future they were promised. Instead, the siblings face anti-immigrant hate and systemic social inequality. Instead of coming together, to form their new life, each sibling slowly diverges from the other. Racked with survivor's guilt and a desire to pave their own path, they'll have to reckon with the ghosts of their past to find their way to a brighter future.

I can't give enough praise to this book. I was entranced by the story told in Wandering Souls, and I'm grateful to the publisher for providing me with a copy of it. Cecile Pin has written a novel that deals with the challenges of memory. How do we keep the memory of loved ones alive? How do we honor our past while moving toward the future? These are the things Pin grapples with. The characters in the book give us an insight into the realities of being an immigrant to a foreign country. Pin intersperses the third-person narrative of her main character Anh with the first-person voice of Anh's deceased younger brother. This ghostly voice ties everything that happens in Anh's life to her past, never fully allowing her to escape it. Also included in the narrative are snippets of factual articles from the time, grounding this fiction in the reality of the world it depicts. These elements come together to tell a visceral story of family, love, and loss. Wandering Souls is the best, most important book that I've read this month, and will no doubt be among my favorite reads of the year.

When their parents planned a route to escape from Vietnam to the US, Anh, Thanh, and Minh didn't expect to become orphaned or land in the UK. Following their resettlement into the new country, the siblings face new identities as refugees while navigating social inequality, racism, and the raging anti-immigrant sentiment. As they mature, each must confront the weight they carry that will diverge their paths.

WANDERING SOULS is a beautifully written page-turner interspersed with the siblings' journey, reporting on the Vietnamese refugees, and a mysterious first-person narrator who reflects on the history and political landscape during the period. While some POVs are a mystery in the beginning, it all comes together powerfully toward the end of the book.

WANDERING SOULS is the first book I've read about Vietnamese immigrants and their experiences in the UK. I find the news reports about the treatment of Vietnamese refugees by the British government and the hypocrisy & racism eye-opening and sickening. However, I do wish the book could've been longer and provided more character development for Anh and her siblings, especially in adulthood.

Regardless, WANDERING SOULS is a beautiful debut that sheds light on an essential piece of history I wasn't previously aware of. It is a book that I didn't want to end, and one that I'll surely recommend to everyone. WANDERING SOULS will make a great next read for fans of ALL THAT'S LEFT UNSAID (Tracey Lien)!

Woof, where to begin. A shorter, but powerful & emotional book. Based off the authors family at the end of the Vietnam War to becoming refugees. I also liked the authors personal notes dispersed throughout the book, whether history or familial tales. Really puts you in the shoes of those Vietnamese refugees plight, heartache & will to live & survive for a better life while leaving a trail of heartbreak from losing loved ones. A book I’m sure I’ll keep thinking about for awhile

Wandering Souls is fictional, but reads like nonfiction. A moving account of a Vietnamese family's escape from Vietnam to their final destination in the UK. A story of family, disappointment, and sadness, but also courage, strength, and determination. Interwoven with historical facts and emotional visits from deceased family members.

Wandering Souls is the first novel from writer Cecile Pin.
The story is about three children who leave Vietnam as the last of the US soldiers there depart. The rest of the family (mother, father, and 4 younger siblings) plan to leave a bit later. They are all supposed to meet up in Hong Kong where they will be sponsored for immigration to the US through their father's brother. Except Ahn, Thanh, and Minh's story doesn't work out as planned. Their parents and siblings never make it to Hong Kong, so Ahn, Thanh, and Minh form their own destiny and immigrate to the UK instead. Their story there becomes one of trying to start their lives over, achieve the things their parents wanted for them, all while trying to acclimate to a new culture that doesn't accept them.

I found the story compelling and it felt true to the kinds of struggles and emotional turmoil refugees, any refugees, must face. I was cheering for Ahn, Thanh, and Minh along the way. I wanted them to find success in their new country. The book also shows the larger truth that no one's life ever turns out exactly the way you expect. I quite like the character of Ahn and the story was told mostly from her point of view. She was a child when orphaned in a strange country and stepped up to care for her two younger brothers and provide for them and worry over them the way a parent would. She was written as a very strong and admirable young woman.

There are several interstitial stories in the book. Most are narrated by the ghost of the youngest son in the family, but there are some that deal with American soldiers and their experiences in Vietnam. I found them superfluous to the story. They didn't really work for me.

Thanks to #NetGalley and #HenryHolt for the #ARC of this book. Overall I enjoyed this historical fiction novel and would recommend it.

𝗪𝗔𝗡𝗗𝗘𝗥𝗜𝗡𝗚 𝗦𝗢𝗨𝗟𝗦 by debut author Cecile Pin was one of those books that was so much more than I’d expected. Hers is a beautifully told story of three siblings who fled Vietnam for Hong Kong after the fall of Saigon. Their parents and four younger siblings were to follow, but their boat sank, leaving 16-year old Ahn in charge of her brothers, Thanh and Minh. Strangers in a strange land, the three are eventually relocated to the UK where they struggle to build lives entirely different from those they’d long dreamt of.⁣
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What made this book so special was the way it was told. Most of the time the story unfolds from Ahn’s perspective, but along the way we also hear from one of her lost siblings, and an unnamed narrator that seems to have a stake in Ahn’s life. On audio, these voices felt especially poignant, eerily real. The book shone a spotlight on the difficulties of being an immigrant, of trying to adapt to an entirely different culture, of struggling to fit into a new place where many don’t want you. ⁣
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I was so impressed, so haunted by 𝘞𝘢𝘯𝘥𝘦𝘳𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘚𝘰𝘶𝘭𝘴 that I already can’t wait to see what Cecile Pin does next. She’s set a high bar! ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️💫⁣
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Thanks to @macmillan.audio and @henryholtbooks for an advanced copies of #WanderingSouls.

This book was such a beautiful and important story of three refugees who travel from South Vietnam to the UK. While I occasionally found the changing perspectives and time periods to be a bit jarring, I was eventually able to piece together and understand what was happening more clearly by the end of the novel.
Spanning 1967 to 2022 this narrative explores survival, perseverance, grief and trauma. I found this book to be absolutely compelling and I know this story will stay with me for a long time. Simply put, this is a stunning debut novel and I will highly recommend it to everyone I know.