The Sympathizer

Praise for The Sympathizer Winner of the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction Winner of the 2016 Edgar Award for Best First Novel Winner of the 2016 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction Winner of the 2016 Dayton Literary Peace Prize for Fiction Winner of the 2015 Center for Fiction First Novel Prize Winner of the 2015-2016 Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature (Adult Fiction) Winner of the 2016 California Book Award for First Fiction Winner of the 2017 Association for Asian American Studies Award for Best Book in Creative Writing (Prose) Finalist for the 2016 PEN/Faulkner Award Finalist for the 2016 PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Fiction Finalist for the 2016 Medici Book Club Prize Finalist for the 2015 Los Angeles Times Book Prize (Mystery/Thriller) Finalist for the 2016 ABA Indies Choice/E.B. White Read-Aloud Award (Book of the Year, Adult Fiction) Shortlisted for the 2017 International Dublin Literary Award Named a Best Book of the Year on more than twenty lists, including the New York Times Book Review, Wall Street Journal, and Washington Post "A layered immigrant tale told in the wry, confessional voice of a 'man of two minds'--and two countries, Vietnam and the United States."--Pulitzer Prize Citation "[A] remarkable debut novel . . . [Nguyen] brings a distinctive perspective to the war and its aftermath. His book fills a void in the literature, giving voice to the previously voiceless . . . The nameless protagonist-narrator, a memorable character despite his anonymity, is an Americanized Vietnamese with a divided heart and mind. Nguyen's skill in portraying this sort of ambivalent personality compares favorably with masters like Conrad, Greene, and le Carre. . . . Both thriller and social satire. . . . In its final chapters, The Sympathizer becomes an absurdist tour de force that might have been written by a Kafka or Genet."--Philip Caputo, New York Times Book Review (cover review) "This is more than a fresh perspective on a familiar subject. [The Sympathizer] is intelligent, relentlessly paced and savagely funny . . . The voice of the double-agent narrator, caustic yet disarmingly honest, etches itself on the memory."--Wall Street Journal (WSJ's Best Books of 2015) "Nguyen doesn't shy away from how traumatic the Vietnam War was for everyone involved. Nor does he pass judgment about where his narrator's loyalties should lie. Most war stories are clear about which side you should root for--The Sympathizer doesn't let the reader off the hook so easily . . . Despite how dark it is, The Sympathizer is still a fast-paced, entertaining read . . . a much-needed Vietnamese perspective on the war."--Bill Gates, Gates Notes "Extraordinary . . . Surely a new classic of war fiction. . . . [Nguyen] has wrapped a cerebral thriller around a desperate expat story that confronts the existential dilemmas of our age. . . . Laced with insight on the ways nonwhite people are rendered invisible in the propaganda that passes for our pop culture. . . . I haven't read anything since Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four that illustrates so palpably how a patient tyrant, unmoored from all humane constraint, can reduce a man's mind to liquid."--Washington Post "The great achievement of The Sympathizer is that it gives the Vietnamese a voice and demands that we pay attention. Until now, it's been largely a one-sided conversation--or at least that's how it seems in American popular culture . . . We've never had a story quite like this one before. . . . [Nguyen] has a great deal to say and a knowing, playful, deeply intelligent voice . . . There are so many passages to admire. Mr. Nguyen is a master of the telling ironic phrase and the biting detail, and the book pulses with Catch-22-style absurdities."--New York Times "Beautifully written and meaty . . . really compelling. I had that kid-like feeling of being inside the book."--Claire Messud, Boston G

Viet Thanh Nguyen was born in Vietnam and raised in America. He is the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of the academic books Race and Resistance and Nothing Ever Dies. He is a cultural critic-at-large for the Los Angeles Times and teaches English and American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California. He lives in Los Angeles.