No Man's Land - by Duong Thu Huong (Paperback)

About the Book

In 1975, and in the remote Vietnamese village of Mountain Hamlet, a wounded, penniless veteran, long thought dead, has returned to claim his now-remarried wife. Now she must choose between the man she loves and the destiny she is honor-bound to fulfill.

Book Synopsis

From Vietnam's most popular writer and famous dissident comes a mesmerizing novel about a tragic love triangle between characters whose destinies have been irrevocably altered by the absurdity of war

No Man's Land is set in a hamlet in the countryside of central Vietnam immediately following the end of the war in 1975, where a young woman, happily married to a successful farmer, comes home one day to find a throng of villagers assembled around her gate. She learns that her first husband, who reportedly died as a martyr and war hero many years back, is in fact alive and has returned to claim her.

About the Author

Duong Thu Huong was born in Vietnam in 1947. At the age of twenty, she led a Communist Youth Brigade sent to the front during the Vietnam War. Of the volunteer group of forty, she was one of only three survivors. A vocal advocate of human rights and democratic reform, Huong was expelled from the Communist Party in 1990 before she was arrested and imprisoned without trial. Though her novels are banned in Vietnam, where she continues to live in internal exile, she remains one of the most popular and controversial writers for Vietnamese readers both at home and abroad.

Translators Nina McPherson and Phan Huy Duong live in Paris. They have also translated Duong Thu Huong's Paradise of the Blind (1993), Novel Without a Name (1995), Memories of a Pure Spring (2000), and Beyond Illusions (2002).