One of the Ten Best Books of the Year, Washington Post Book World One of the Los Angeles Times’ Favorite Books of the Year One of the Top Ten National Books of 2008, Portland Oregonian A 2009 Honor Book of the Asian/Pacific American Librarians Association “Few books have combined the historical scope and the literary skill to give the foreign reader a sense of events from a Vietnamese perspective. . . . Now we can add Andrew Pham’s Eaves of Heaven to this list of indispensable books.” —New York Times Book Review “Searing . . . vivid–and harrowing . . . Here is war and life through the eyes of a Vietnamese everyman.” —Seattle Times Once wealthy landowners, Thong Van Pham’s family was shattered by the tumultuous events of the twentieth century: the French occupation of Indochina, the Japanese invasion during World War II, and the Vietnam War. Told in dazzling chapters that alternate between events in the past and those closer to the present, The Eaves of Heaven brilliantly re-creates the trials of everyday life in Vietnam as endured by one man, from the fall of Hanoi and the collapse of French colonialism to the frenzied evacuation of Saigon. Pham offers a rare portal into a lost world as he chronicles Thong Van Pham’s heartbreaks, triumphs, and bizarre reversals of fortune, whether as a South Vietnamese soldier pinned down by enemy ﬁre, a prisoner of the North Vietnamese under brutal interrogation, or a refugee desperately trying to escape Vietnam after the last American helicopter has abandoned Saigon. This is the story of a man caught in the maelstrom of twentieth-century politics, a gripping memoir told with the urgency of a wartime dispatch by a writer of surpassing talent.

The Eaves of Heaven: A Life in Three Wars

Biographies & Memoirs

Pham, Andrew X.

Historical

Crown

Catfish and Mandala: A Two-Wheeled Voyage through the Landscape and Memory of Vietnam

A Vietnamese Bicycle Days by a stunning new voice in American letters. Andrew X. Pham dreamed of becoming a writer. Born in Vietnam and raised in California, he held technical jobs at United Airlines-and always carried a letter of resignation in his briefcase. His father had been a POW of the Vietcong; his family came to America as "boat people." His sister committed suicide, prompting Andrew to quit his job. He sold all of his possessions and embarked on a year-long bicycle journey that took him through the Mexican desert, where he was treated as a bueno hermano, a "good brother"; around a thousand-mile loop from Narita to Kyoto in Japan; and, after five months and 2,357 miles, to Saigon, where he finds "nothing familiar in the bombed-out darkness." In Mexico he's treated kindly as a Vietnamito, though he shouts, "I'm American, Vietnamese American!" In Vietnam, he's taken for Japanese or Korean by his countrymen, except, of course, by his relatives, who doubt that as a Vietnamese he has the stamina to complete his journey ("Only Westerners can do it"); and in the United States he's considered anything but American. A vibrant, picaresque memoir written with narrative flair and a wonderful, eye-opening sense of adventure, Catfish and Mandala is an unforgettable search for cultural identity.

Catfish and Mandala: A Two-Wheeled Voyage Through the Landscape and Memory of Vietnam

Community & Culture

Farrar. Straus and Giroux

Taken from back cover:Every so often a gifted writer manages to produce a travel book that, while dealing with a place our culture he knows well, still has all the sharpness and strangeness of a dispatch from the dark side of the moon. Such a book is Andrew X. Pham's remarkable "Catfish and Mandala"-Adam Goodheart, the New York Times book review.Far more than a travelogue.... Catfish and Mandala is a seamlessly constructed work deftly combining literary techniques with careful, evenhanded reportage.... Pham opens readers to the full sadness of the human condition on both sides of the world, marveling at spiritual resilience amid irreconcilable facts.---Roland Kelts, The Philadelphia Inquirer.Engaging, vigorously told.... A fresh and original look at how proud the anemones on the wars losing side reconciled having their identity abruptly hyphenated to Vietnamese- American.---Gavin Scott, Chicago Tribune.

Travel

Asia

Farrar, Strauss & Giroux

The peak of the hot season, 1942: The wars in Europe and Asia and the Japanese occupation have upset the uneasy balance of French Indochina. In a small Vietnamese fishing village, Tuyet ekes out a living with her aunt, cousin, and two-year-old daughter. But when Tuyet meets Japanese major Yamazaki Takeshi, to her surprise, she comes to find a strange kinship with him. A wounded veteran with a good heart, he grows to resent the Empire for what it has taken--and the promises it has failed to keep. As the Viet Minh begin to battle the French and Takeshi risks his life for the Resistance, Tuyet and her family are drawn into the conflict, with devastating consequences. A lushly panoramic novel, by turns gritty and profoundly moving, Twilight Territory is a war story and a love story that offers a fascinating perspective on Vietnam's struggles to break free of its French colonial past.

Twilight Territory: A Novel

Literature & Fiction

Literary

W.W.Norton&Company

Mond über den Reisfeldern. Auf den Spuren meiner Familie durch Vietnam.

Goldmann

Mond über den Reisfeldern. Einmal Vietnam und zurück.

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Books by Pham, Andrew X.