The Sorrow of War A Novel of North Vietnam [Paperback]

The daring and controversial novel that took the world by storm--a story of politics, selfhood, survival, and war.

Heart-wrenching, fragmented, raw, former North Vietnamese solder Bao Ninh'sThe Sorrow of Warprovides a strikingly honest look at how the Vietnam War forever changed his life, his country, and the people who live there. Kien, a lone survivor from the Glorious 27th Youth brigade of the Vietcong, revisits the haunting sites of battles and relives a parade of horrors, as he grapples with his ghosts, his alcoholism and attempts to arrange his life in writing. Originally published against government wishes in Vietnam because of its nonheroic, non-ideological tone, Ninh's now classic work has won worldwide acclaim and become an international bestseller. The first critical portrayal of life in the North Vietnamese army ever to appear in Vietnam . . . The censors were evidently moved by the book's unflinching sincerity and Ninh's literary gifts.
—Time

Vaults over all the American fiction that came out of the Vietnam War to take its place alongside the greatest war novel of the century, All Quiet on the Western Front. And this is to understate its qualities, for, unlike All Quiet, it is a novel about much more than war. A book about writing, about lost youth, it is also a beautiful, agonizing love story.
—The Independent

Dramatic . . . Chronicle[s] the wrecked lives of North Vietnamese soldiers who enter the war with blazing idealism, only to sink deeper into disillusionment and pessimism as everything they know falls apart around them . . . Will force American readers to acknowledge how little they still understand of the long war that left such a legacy of grief and guilt in their own country.
—The Washington Post

Powerful . . . Make[s] North Vietnamese soldiers human, wrenched by the same fear and pail3.