The Refugees

From the winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, 2016

'A powerful antidote to all the fearmongering and lies out there . . . A rich exploration of human identity, family ties and love and loss, never has a short story collection been timelier' ***** Five stars, the Independent

In The Refugees, Viet Thanh Nguyen gives voice to lives led between two worlds, the adopted homeland and the country of birth. From a young Vietnamese refugee who suffers profound culture shock when he comes to live with two gay men in San Francisco, to a woman whose husband is suffering from dementia and starts to confuse her for a former lover, to a girl living in Ho Chi Minh City whose older half-sister comes back from America having seemingly accomplished everything she never will, the stories are a captivating testament to the dreams and hardships of immigration. The second piece of fiction by a major new voice, The Refugees is a beautifully written and sharply observed book about the aspirations of those who leave one country for another, and the relationships and desires for self-fulfillment that define our lives.


An Amazon Best Book of the Month (Literature and Fiction)

'Nguyen's eight heart-wrenching and hopeful stories ought to be required reading for every politician in this era of wall-building and xenophobia' the Guardian

'With anger but not despair, with reconciliation but not unrealistic hope, and with genuine humour that is not used to diminish anyone, Nguyen has breathed life into many unforgettable characters, and given us a timely book focusing, in the words of Willa Cather, on "the slow working out of fate in people of allied sentiment and allied blood"' the Guardian

'Beautiful and heartrending' Joyce Carol Oates in the New Yorker

'[A] superb collection . . . exquisite stories . . . Nguyen crafts dazzlingly lucid prose' the Observer

'Poignant . . . Nguyen writes most movingly . . . The form of the short story seems to come to Nguyen effortlessly' Financial Times