First published 2023
Tricia arrives in Saigon as a newlywed in 1963, following her husband who works as an oil engineer for US Navy Intelligence. After she loses her pregnancy, Charlene takes her under wing. Charlene runs the social circles of American corporate wives with three children of her own and an unshakeable belief in doing good works. She recruits Tricia into her group of well-meaning American women who visit hospitals, orphanages, and leper colonies with baskets of candy and toys. They believe they can fix the suffering they witness around them. Sixty years pass. Charlene has died, but her daughter contacts Tricia, now a widow in Washington. The two women revisit their time in Vietnam and reckon with how Charlene's drive to perform what she called "inconsequential good" marked both their lives. The story examines what happens when good intentions meet complex realities in a country Americans never fully understood.
Genres: literary-fiction, american-fiction, historical-fiction, 20th-century, contemporary, 21st-century
Vibes: emotional, intimate, thought-provoking
Tropes: complex-characters, moral-ambiguity, reckoning-with-the-past
Setting: Saigon, Vietnam, Washington
Period: 1963, Sixty Years Later
324 pages · Hardcover · Farrar, Straus and Giroux