A Man of Two Faces

VIET THANH NGUYEN

(CORSAIR, 400 PP, £22)
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Mentally, many of us are still in Saigon. We hear helicopter blades whirring, remember seeing a man being shot, a girl on fire. But they’re second-hand memories from TV images, and from movies, mostly American-made. Viet Thanh Nguyen is trapped in Vietnam too, in his head, but he’s a real refugee, an infant “boat person”, now an American citizen with leftist sympathies, a Pulitzer Prize-winner with works banned in today’s Communist Vietnam.