Samira Sawlani reviews The Refugees by Viet Thanh Nguyen for Media Diversified in this 2017 list for Top 15 Books by Novelists of Color.
The Refugees, By Viet Thanh Nguyen
Timely, touching and traumatic. This collection of short stories centred by Vietnamese- American writer Viet Thanh Nguyen is dedicated to ‘all refugees everywhere’, and is both dazzling and devastating.
A collection of eight stories exploring the lives of members of the Vietnamese community, forced to leave home, straddling two worlds, two countries, to worlds.
This collection is a reminder that displacement and migration is not just a set of circumstances, it is an experience, carried by our bodies, our minds, our memories.
If ever there was a time a book like this needed to be written, it is now.
