Here are 100 books that The Refugees fans have personally recommended if you like
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I am Christina Vo, an author deeply passionate about exploring themes of healing and intergenerational trauma, particularly within the Vietnamese community. My personal journey and family history have profoundly influenced my understanding of these topics, as my own experiences have driven me to seek out stories that resonate with resilience and recovery. Writing and reading about these themes have been a way to process my past and connect with others who share similar experiences. Through my books and this curated list, I aim to highlight the voices and stories that inspire healing and foster a deeper understanding of our collective history.
This memoir by Le Ly Hayslip profoundly impacted me with its raw and heartfelt narrative of survival and resilience. The personal account of her experiences during and after the Vietnam War highlights the intergenerational trauma and the journey of healing.
Her courage and strength are incredibly inspiring, making it a must-read for understanding the human aspects of war and its long-lasting effects on families.
“One of the most important books of Vietnamese American and Vietnam War literature...Moving, powerful.” —Viet Thanh Nguyen, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Sympathizer
In these pages, Le Ly Hayslip—just twelve years old when U.S. helicopters landed in her tiny village of Ky La—shows us the Vietnam War as she lived it. Initially pressed into service by the Vietcong, Le Ly was captured and imprisoned by government forces. She found sanctuary at last with an American contractor and ultimately fled to the United States. Almost twenty years after her escape, Le Ly found herself inexorably drawn back to the devastated country…
I am Christina Vo, an author deeply passionate about exploring themes of healing and intergenerational trauma, particularly within the Vietnamese community. My personal journey and family history have profoundly influenced my understanding of these topics, as my own experiences have driven me to seek out stories that resonate with resilience and recovery. Writing and reading about these themes have been a way to process my past and connect with others who share similar experiences. Through my books and this curated list, I aim to highlight the voices and stories that inspire healing and foster a deeper understanding of our collective history.
Thi Bui's graphic memoir offers a touching and visually stunning account of her family's journey from Vietnam to the United States. I was captivated by how she intertwines her personal story with historical context, providing a deep understanding of the refugee experience and its generational impacts.
The book's emotional depth and beautiful illustrations make it a profound exploration of family, trauma, and resilience.
National bestseller 2017 National Book Critics Circle (NBCC) Finalist ABA Indies Introduce Winter / Spring 2017 Selection Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Spring 2017 Selection ALA 2018 Notable Books Selection
An intimate and poignant graphic novel portraying one family's journey from war-torn Vietnam, from debut author Thi Bui.
This beautifully illustrated and emotional story is an evocative memoir about the search for a better future and a longing for the past. Exploring the anguish of immigration and the lasting effects that displacement has on a child and her family, Bui documents the story of her family's daring escape…
I am Christina Vo, an author deeply passionate about exploring themes of healing and intergenerational trauma, particularly within the Vietnamese community. My personal journey and family history have profoundly influenced my understanding of these topics, as my own experiences have driven me to seek out stories that resonate with resilience and recovery. Writing and reading about these themes have been a way to process my past and connect with others who share similar experiences. Through my books and this curated list, I aim to highlight the voices and stories that inspire healing and foster a deeper understanding of our collective history.
Thanhha Lai's semi-autobiographical novel in verse form tells the story of a young girl's journey from war-torn Vietnam to the United States.
I was deeply touched by the poetic narrative and the vivid depiction of the refugee experience. The book beautifully captures the challenges of adapting to a new life while carrying the weight of past trauma, making it a compelling read for all ages.
Ten-year-old Ha has only ever known Saigon: the thrills of its markets, the joy of its traditions, and the warmth of her family and friends close by. But when the Vietnam War reaches the gates of her home, Ha and her family are forced to flee.
The journey onboard a refugee ship bound for America is hard - but nothing can prepare Ha for the strangeness of the country that greets them on the other side. The language is impossible, the food is strange - and not all the locals are friendly. But amongst her struggles, Ha finds joy, friendship…
I am Christina Vo, an author deeply passionate about exploring themes of healing and intergenerational trauma, particularly within the Vietnamese community. My personal journey and family history have profoundly influenced my understanding of these topics, as my own experiences have driven me to seek out stories that resonate with resilience and recovery. Writing and reading about these themes have been a way to process my past and connect with others who share similar experiences. Through my books and this curated list, I aim to highlight the voices and stories that inspire healing and foster a deeper understanding of our collective history.
This lyrical and poignant memoir chronicles Kim Thúy's journey from Vietnam to Quebec as a refugee. The book's fragmented narrative mirrors the process of piecing together memories and identities.
I was particularly moved by the author's ability to convey profound emotions with simplicity and elegance, making it a touching exploration of intergenerational trauma and the healing power of storytelling.
Ru: In Vietnamese it means lullaby; in French it is a small stream, but also signifies a flow - of tears, blood, money. Kim Thuy's Ru is literature at its most crystalline: the flow of a life on the tides of unrest and on to more peaceful waters. In vignettes of exquisite clarity, sharp observation and sly wit, we are carried along on an unforgettable journey from a palatial residence in Saigon to a crowded and muddy Malaysian refugee camp, and onward to a new life in Quebec. There, the young girl feels the embrace of a new community, and…
When I was invited to write a historical fiction that appealed to male readers, I wanted to showcase the struggles and dramas in peacetime rather than in war. Scientists vilifying the fly in order to demonstrate the connection between microbes and disease—and enlisting children to kill the fly—now that was a battle I could get behind. Revenge on the Fly, in all the forty books I’ve written, is my only foray into historical fiction. However, like most writers, I read across the genres voraciously. What I most love to read and write about are strong characters who demonstrate unwavering resilience.
Many authors like to use the drama of battle to engage readers in history but instead in Last Airlift Marsha Skrypuch uses the emotional aftermath and upheaval. Thisis the real-life story of Son Thi Anh Tuyet at eight years old when she is rescued from a Saigon orphanage and airlifted to Toronto in April of 1975. Tuyet has survived polio and feels her limp will prevent her from being adopted so she makes herself useful and looks after the orphan babies. When she arrives in Canada, she expects to continue her role as a caregiver for children but instead finds a family that cares about her.
A true story about life in a Saigon orphanage, a dramatic rescue flight from Vietnam to Canada, adoption by a Canadian family, and growing up in Canada.
Last Airlift is the true story of the last Canadian airlift operation that left Saigon and arrived in Toronto on April 13, 1975. Son Thi Anh Tuyet was one of 57 babies and children on that flight. Based on personal interviews and enhanced with archive photos, Tuyet's story of the Saigon orphanage and her flight to Canada is an emotional and suspenseful journey brought to life by award-winning children's author, Marsha Forchuk Skrypuch.…
Born into a powerfully matrilineal family (my mother chose my name when she was twelve) in small town Appalachia, I believe that we inherit our parents’ unresolved emotional dilemmas as well as their physical characteristics, and that the sensual elements of places our families may have inhabited for generations are “bred in the bone.” I’ve always said that history tells us the facts, but literature tells us the story. I’m a language-conscious writer who began as a poet, so that each line has a beat and a rhythm. Words awaken our memories and the powerful unconscious knowledge we all possess. The reader meets the writer inside the story: it’s a connection of mind and heart.
I loved Waltzing With The Dragons for its autobiographical sense of history and description of mother/daughter bonds that are truly universal.
The story begins in 1922 with Ly, the daughter of one of the last Mandarins in north Vietnam, who flees an arranged marriage at thirteen to stay with her father’s friends, a French couple, and lives through the WWII Japanese occupation, finally fleeing to the South where she falls in love with a French Army doctor and gives birth to a daughter, Mai-Tam, in 1952.
Mai-Tam, who is Eurasian and never feels she belongs, grows up in the shadow of the American-Vietnam war. The novel ends in 1967, preserving a mother-daughter kinship that sustains migration and separation.
Waltzing with the Dragons is the true story of a Vietnamese woman and her Eurasian daughter.Born in 1922 in the north of Vietnam, under French colonial rule, Ly was the daughter of one of the last Mandarins, a childhood friend of Ho Chi Minh. After she rebelled against her family, by refusing an arranged marriage at thirteen, she was sent to live with her father’s best friends, a French couple. It was the beginning of a life-long love affair with French culture and lifestyle. At seventeen, she married a French army officer who, shortly there after, was killed in action.…
In the crucial period after the end of WW2 the stage became set for thirty years of war in Vietnam, yet there’s very little written of it. My stepfather was there, and Hanoi, Adieu is a memoir of his experiences and his sentiments about what happened in the country he’d grown to love. I have a fascination for Southeast Asian history and he was keen for me to tell his story such that readers could absorb the history through his book. I have recommended here those I enjoyed and found useful from a historical or atmospheric perspective in the larger context of French Indochina. I hope you will too.
If you don’t mind a long read and are after a novel rather than non-fiction then this is my pick. It is an epic saga of the last decades of the French in Indochina, following the story of American Joseph Sherman who becomes enchanted by the country and entangled in the lives of two different families, one French and one Vietnamese. It is essentially a love story involving a Mandarin’s daughter but it will give you a flavour of the political plot twists and military conflicts that were the reality of this turbulent period of history. The book spans 50 years to the end of the Vietnam War in 1975, but refreshingly does not try to push any real political perspective. Once again, it is a novel but it will certainly give you a taste of Indochineand an idea of the grand sweep of Vietnam’s tumultuous history.
An epic saga of love, blood, and destiny in twentieth-century Vietnam: "This superb novel could well be the War and Peace of our age" (San Francisco Chronicle).
Joseph Sherman first visits Saigon-the capital of French colonial Cochin-China-as a young man on his father's hunting trip in 1925. But the exotic land lures him back again and again as a traveler, soldier, and reporter. He returns because of his fascination for the enchanting city-and for Lan, a mandarin's daughter he cannot forget.
Over five decades Joseph's life becomes enmeshed with the political intrigues of two of Saigon's most influential families, the…
About thirty years ago I learned that my great-grandaunt Annie was, arguably, the first woman to circle the world by bicycle (1894-1895) and I spent years rescuing her story from the trash bin of history, for she was virtually forgotten for more than a century. An avid cyclist myself, Annie became both my muse and my inspiration. She was an outlandish character who stepped far outside the bounds of what was expected for women of her time; among other things, she was the married mother of three young children when she took off from Boston for fifteen months on the road, and she pioneered sports-related marketing for women, securing corporate sponsors and adorning her body and her bicycle with advertisements wherever she traveled.
This New York Times Notable Book of the Year by a Vietnamese-American who was forced to flee his native country after the fall of Saigon is both travelogue and memoir, beautifully written, and a profound meditation on identity.
'Jack Kerouac meets "Wild Swans".' The Times. A voyage through Vietnam's ghost-ridden landscape, at once a moving memoir, travelogue and compelling search for identity.
Vietnamese-born Andrew Pham finally returns to Saigon, not as a success showering money and gifts onto his family, but as an emotional shipwreck, desperate to find out who he really is. When his sister, a post-operative transsexual, committed suicide, Pham sold all his possessions and embarked on a year-long bicycle journey that took him through the Mexican desert; around a thousand-mile loop from Narita to Kyoto in Japan; and, after five months and 2,357 miles, to…
Who hasn’t seen the classic American movies on the Vietnam War–Apocalypse Now, The Deer Hunter, or Platoon? They are fine films, but have you ever asked yourself where the Vietnamese are? Save for a few stereotyped cameo appearances, they are remarkably absent. I teach the history of the wars in Vietnam at the Université du Québec à Montréal. My students and I explore the French and the American sides in the wars for Vietnam, but one of the things that I’ve tried to do with them is weave the Vietnamese and their voices into our course; this list provides a window into those Vietnamese voices.
If you like graphic memoirs and want one on the Vietnam War, Marcelino Truong’s Such a Lovely Little War is for you.
It’s an autobiographical tale of Truong’s life as the son of a Vietnamese diplomat working for the South Vietnam government and a French mother. We see the war through his eyes, but we also see the world he encountered as a teenager in London, Washington, and then back in Saigon.
The dialogue and the graphics are superb. The juxtaposition between his family and this “lovely little war” turning around it makes this memoir of the Vietnam War a highly original one.
This riveting, beautifully produced graphic memoir tells the story of the early years of the Vietnam war as seen through the eyes of a young boy named Marco, the son of a Vietnamese diplomat and his French wife. The book opens in America, where the boy's father works for the South Vietnam embassy; there the boy is made to feel self-conscious about his otherness thanks to schoolmates who play war games against the so-called "Commies." The family is called back to Saigon in 1961, where the father becomes Prime Minister Ngo Dinh Diem's personal interpreter; as the growing conflict between…
From an early age, I have made a life out of listening to, telling, teaching, and writing about war stories. I am intrigued by their widespread personal and public importance. My changing associations with these stories and their tellers have paralleled evolving stages in my life—son, soldier, father, and college professor. Each stage has spawned different questions and insights about the tales and their narrators. At various moments in my own life, these war stories have also given rise to fantasized adventure, catharsis, emotional highs and lows, insights about human nature tested within the crucible of war, and intriguing relationships with the storytellers—their lives and minds.
As a Vietnam veteran, teacher of war literature, and writer, I am disappointed that I never interviewed Michael Herr. I can only imagine what such an encounter might have been like with this larger-than-life figure, at least the persona (adrenaline junky, reporter on drugs) found in this fragmented collection of war reportage. With its New Journalistic style and content, the sensory-overload writing might be best described as a collection of literary illumination rounds (their underlying message—war is hell and addictive). As a freelance journalist, Herr arrived in Vietnam wanting to reveal the large ugly truths about the war, which he succeeds in doing, but I find the soldiers’ personal war stories more gripping and truthful. For me and even Herr, the real surprise is that this book ultimately chronicles the author’s own war story of innocence lost: the anti-war reporter becomes just as addicted to war as some of his…
A groundbreaking piece of journalism which inspired Stanley Kubrick's classic Vietnam War film Full Metal Jacket.
We took space back quickly, expensively, with total panic and close to maximum brutality. Our machine was devastating. And versatile. It could do everything but stop.
Michael Herr went to Vietnam as a war correspondent for Esquire. He returned to tell the real story in all its hallucinatory madness and brutality, cutting to the quick of the conflict and its seductive, devastating impact on a generation of young men. His unflinching account is haunting in its violence, but…
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