Books from Vietnam

Other Moons is an anthology of twenty short stories by Vietnamese writers, each addressing the conflict that lasted from 1954 to 1975 and its aftereffects. In Vietnam the war is commonly called the American War, and this collection presents perspectives that remain underrepresented in English-language publishing. The authors include veterans alongside civilian writers, and their approaches range from social realism to stories that incorporate the supernatural.

The situations in these stories are specific and varied. A North Vietnamese soldier forms a quiet bond with an abandoned puppy. Two cousins discover that their fathers fought on opposing sides. Veterans in Hanoi reconnect through a newspaper dating service years after the fighting ended. A psychic helps search for the remains of a missing soldier. A father whose daughter suffers from dioxin poisoning confronts uncooperative local officials. Some stories center on Agent Orange exposure; others use ghost narratives to address what remains unresolved.

The collection moves between the intimate and the collective, touching on remembrance, trauma, and how people continue to live alongside a conflict that shaped families, communities, and landscapes across Vietnam. The styles shift from story to story, reflecting the range of literary traditions the authors draw on.

Find on Amazon (Paperback) ↗Link to this book

Thuy Diem Pham grew up in a small village in southern Vietnam, where daily life revolved around livestock, fruit trees, morning markets, and street food stalls. Those early experiences shaped her understanding of Vietnamese cooking as something rooted in fresh ingredients and direct, uncomplicated preparation. Years later, she and her husband Dave opened The Little Viet Kitchen in Islington, London, a restaurant built around the flavors and methods Pham carried from her childhood.

This book collects 100 recipes drawn from that background. The dishes reflect a home-cooking sensibility rather than a purely restaurant-oriented approach, aiming to make Vietnamese food accessible to readers working in ordinary kitchens with widely available ingredients. Southern Vietnamese cuisine tends to favor sweetness, fresh herbs, and raw vegetables served alongside cooked dishes, and Pham's recipes sit within that tradition.

The book connects two places separated by thousands of kilometers: a rural village in Vietnam's south and a neighborhood restaurant in north London. Pham treats both settings as part of the same food story, using her restaurant's name as a frame for recipes that belong, in origin, to markets, family meals, and roadside vendors.

Find on Amazon (Hardcover) ↗Link to this book

The Mountains Sing follows the Trần family across several decades of conflict in Việt Nam, told through two voices. Trần Diệu Lan, born in 1920, narrates her experiences of the Land Reform period, when the Communist government consolidated power in the North and she was forced to abandon the family farm with her six children. Her granddaughter, Hương, grows up in Hà Nội during the war years, watching her parents and uncles leave one by one to travel the Hồ Chí Minh Trail as soldiers.

Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai, a Vietnamese poet and writer, sets the novel's events against a stretch of twentieth-century history that reshaped the country several times over. The story moves between the grandmother's earlier life and the granddaughter's childhood, linking the two through family memory, folk traditions, and the practical weight of absence. Each generation faces a different phase of upheaval, but the domestic details of meals, proverbs, and small acts of care hold the chapters together as firmly as the larger historical events.

The novel is written in English and draws on Vietnamese poetry, proverbs, and naming customs throughout. It presents the war primarily from within Vietnamese civilian life, a perspective that remains uncommon in English-language fiction about the conflict.

Find on Amazon (Hardcover) ↗Link to this book

The Sorrow of War follows Kien, a former infantry soldier from Hanoi, as he moves between three periods of his life: his youth before the war, his years of combat, and his difficult return to civilian existence. The novel opens with Kien recovering and burying the dead at the site of one of the conflict's most devastating battles. From there, the narrative shifts back and forth in time, tracing how war dissolved the ordinary hopes he once carried.

Bao Ninh served as a North Vietnamese soldier, and the book draws on that experience. When it was first published in Vietnam, it met resistance from authorities because it refused to frame the war in heroic or ideological terms. Instead, it presents combat and its aftermath with a directness that includes grief, confusion, and the long weight of survival. Kien's attempts to write about what he witnessed in postwar Hanoi form a central thread, as he struggles to organize memory, loss, and love into something he can hold steady on the page.

The novel attracted wide international attention and became a bestseller outside Vietnam. Its structure mirrors the fragmented way memory works under pressure, jumping between moments of adolescent tenderness and scenes of destruction without settling into a single chronological line.

Find on Amazon (Paperback) ↗Link to this book

W.D. Ehrhart's Vietnam-Perkasie is an autobiographical account that moves between two poles named in the title: Vietnam, where Ehrhart served as a young Marine, and Perkasie, the small borough in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, where he grew up. The book follows Ehrhart from his teenage years in a quiet American town through his enlistment and into the war itself. It was his first extended work of prose, though by the time of its publication he was already recognized as a significant voice in Vietnam War literature. In 1982, John Newman, curator of the Vietnam War Literature Collection at Colorado State University, described Ehrhart as one of the major figures in that field.

The narrative is structured in a novelistic way, but the events are drawn from Ehrhart's own experience. The contrast between ordinary small-town life and the realities of combat gives the book its central tension. Rather than offering a strategic or political overview, the account stays close to one person's perspective, recording what he saw, felt, and carried with him. Perkasie and Vietnam become two reference points for measuring how the war changed one young American's understanding of the world he came from and the one he entered.

Find on Amazon (Paperback) ↗Link to this book