Wandering Souls

October 1, 2022

In former lawyer/current TV writer Cauley's The Survivalists, perpetually single Black lawyer Aretha is laser-focused on her career until she becomes involved coffee-entrepreneur Aaron and moves in with him and his doomsday roommates, prepping for the end of the world. Mirabella's Brother & Sister Enter the Forest, whose title hints at fairytale or horror (maybe both?), is a queer coming-of-age novel about emotionally shattered Justin and his sister, Willa, who's struggling to care for him--or to leave and claim her own life. Imbued with mythic figures--the ocean-dwelling Mama Dglo, the butcher-hunting Rolling Calf--Palmer's The Human Origins of Beatrice Porter & Other Essential Ghosts plumbs the lives of two Jamaican-Trinidadian sisters in Brooklyn who find themselves at odds even as their parents' marriage becomes untethered. In Wandering Souls, London Writers Award winner Pin depicts three Vietnamese siblings struggling to survive in the UK without their parents, lost in the family's escape from Vietnam after the war (80,000-copy first printing). In Winn's In Memoriam, Henry Gaunt escapes his strong feelings for boarding-school classmate Sidney Ellwood by enlisting during World War I--but then Sidney enlists, too, and they find love amid battle.

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January 16, 2023
Pin follows three refugees out of Vietnam to England in her powerful debut. In 1978, Thi Anh, 16, and two younger brothers, Minh and Thanh, survive the treacherous journey to Hong Kong, but their parents and four younger siblings drown, events prefigured in Pin’s matter-of-fact opening line: “There are the goodbyes and then the fishing out of the bodies—everything in between is speculation.” Anh is bitter about her uncle in the U.S., who urged her family to flee and told them stories of his life in New Haven, Conn., and lies to aid workers, saying they have no family abroad. Months later, they are resettled in Sopley, England, and struggle to adjust while waiting for public housing. As the years pass, Anh works in a garment factory, Minh and Thanh progress through school with varying degrees of success—Minh drops out and deals drugs, Thanh finishes his A-levels, but abandons his plans for university, fearing his grades aren’t good enough for scholarships. Pin smoothly juggles Anh’s narrative with snippets of speeches and news reports that provide conflicting views of Margaret Thatcher’s policies toward refugees, as well chapters from the perspectives of the ghost of a younger brother, refugees who are sexually assaulted in Thailand, and a narrator—unidentified until the end—who feels great pressure to do justice to their family’s experiences. With concision and clarity, the author shows a deep understanding of how upheaval can splinter families.

March 1, 2023
The members of a family of Vietnamese refugees--all wandering souls in their own ways--seek to understand the past while searching for hope in the present. "Everything will be alright, you'll see," 16-year-old Thi Anh promises her younger sister Van one night in 1978 as she and two of her brothers leave Vung Tham for a perilous boat journey to Hong Kong. Her parents have promised to follow with her other siblings, and once the family reunites, they plan to make their way together to an uncle's house in America. Three months later, though, Anh and her brothers are orphaned, and they must make their way alone through refugee camps toward their assigned resettlement location in England. As the siblings adapt to a new language and culture, they also must struggle against the prejudice tacitly accepted by a Thatcher-ite government that hides its own hostility beneath a hospitable veneer. Framed by the first-person narrative of Anh's writer daughter Jane in the present day, the novel shifts among multiple perspectives, including that of Anh; her daughter Jane, writing from the present day; the ghost of her brother Dao; two American soldiers involved in the real-life Operation Wandering Soul in 1967 Vietnam; and found historical documents. Pin handles the alternating perspectives skillfully, though Jane's voice is the most fully lived in and original, offering a tender and rigorous exploration of the stakes of writing about trauma as she tries to "carve out a story between the macabre and the fairy tale, so that a glimmer of truth can appear." In her meditations on storytelling, Jane recalls Joan Didion, among other literary greats, an invocation that could feel clich�d. Pin earns it, however, as Jane delves into the cultural, psychological, and political stakes of grief and what happens when writing about the past "[rips] open wounds" she never knew she had. A tender and rigorous debut from the new Didion of the Asian diaspora.

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March 15, 2023
Anh and her younger brothers, Minh and Thanh, have been through everything together. They traveled together by boat out of Vietnam after the fall of Saigon, to a refugee camp, thinking their parents and four younger siblings would soon follow. But tragedy devastates the family, and the three siblings are all alone. They manage to not only survive but to also find comfort in an older woman, Ba, and her grandson, Duc, who is close in age to the boys. They become a makeshift family. Anh dreams of taking the boys to America as her parents had always planned, but relocation services send them to England. Thankfully, Ba and Duc are also in London, but the orphans are still left to navigate a foreign city largely on their own. Anh sacrifices normal adolescence so that she can provide for the boys. Thanh devotes himself to his studies, while Minh rejects education but finds the workforce infuriating with its language and cultural barriers. Pin's debut follows the siblings into adulthood and parenthood, weaving an unforgettable story of dreams, grief, family, and home.

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