Heartbreaking and exquisitely constructed, Pin's accomplished debut follows a group of Vietnamese refugees as they navigate their way through the cold individuality of Thatcher's Britain, guided only by the voice of their deceased younger brother.
Waterstones Fiction Book of the Month for January 2024
Longlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction 2023
An extraordinary and heartbreaking debut novel about the bonds that connect people even when separated by seas or death itself.
There are the goodbyes and then the fishing out of the bodies - everything in between is speculation.
One night, not long after the last American troops leave Vietnam, siblings Anh, Thanh and Minh flee their village and embark on a perilous boat journey to Hong Kong. Their parents and four younger siblings make the crossing in another vessel but as weeks go by it becomes clear that only one party has survived the voyage.
Anh, Thanh and Minh suddenly find themselves alone in the world, without family or home. They travel on, navigating refugee camps and resettlement centres until, by a twist of fate, they arrive in Thatcher's Britain. Here they must somehow build new lives with only each other to turn to, but will that be enough in a place that doesn't seem to want them?
In this piercing debut, the siblings' faltering journey is deftly interwoven with the voice of their lost younger brother, Dao, following them from a place between the living and the dead, and the records of an unknown researcher intent on gathering the strands of their story. Revelatory and inventive, Wandering Souls paints a heart-wrenching portrait of a family in unimaginable adversity while exploring the healing power of stories.
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
ISBN: 9780008528812
Number of pages: 256
Weight: 220 g
Dimensions: 198 x 129 x 17 mm
‘I raced through it. Beautiful, brilliant, unflinching’ R. F. KUANG ‘This lean, affecting book packs a mighty punch and heralds a dazzling new talent’ OBSERVER ‘Powerful … a bold debut that breaks new ground’ SUNDAY TIMES ‘A deeply humane and genre-defying work of love and uncompromising hope through a long-overdue portrayal of Vietnamese life in the UK’ OCEAN VUONG ‘A heartbreaking novel … a deeply affecting reckoning with history’ i-D MAGAZINE ‘A poignant saga with its grieving, beating heart firmly in the right place, and heralds the arrival of an ambitious and promising new talent’ GUARDIAN ‘A powerful story of courage, love and unwavering hope’ MARIE CLAIRE ‘Something special – a polyvocal novel, an essay on inherited trauma and a quiet metafiction about telling stories we don’t own’ NEW YORK TIMES ‘Meticulously researched and beautifully imagined … deeply affecting’ TASH AW ‘As relevant now as it ever was. You won’t get through this without your heart breaking’ AnOther ‘Deeply moving and deeply generous … I cried reading it’ YARA RODRIGUES FOWLER ‘A searing, sweeping and intimate story of such heart and scope’ RACHEL LONG ‘Historical epic Wandering Souls … [offers] a very different take on the immigrant experience’ VOGUE ‘An enormously evocative portrait of dispossession’ FINANCIAL TIMES
The hauntingly beautiful debut novel charts the heritage of the young girl’s family history. Pin cleverly uses multiple narrators to tell the story from each point of view.
Essentially, we get to read how a family...
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Three young siblings navigate emigration from post-occupied Vietnam in the late 70s without their parents or younger siblings. The narrative was crafted beautifully and I liked how the chapters alternated in timeline... More
A sweeping, compelling and deeply moving tale of heritage, family and hope. Beautifully written with a unique style of storytelling and structure, Cecile Pin has crafted a visceral story that's equal parts... More
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