The Sorrow of War

Bao Ninh author Frank Palmos translator Phan Thanh Hao translator

Format:Paperback

Publisher:Vintage Publishing

Published:17th Oct '94

£9.99

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The Sorrow of War cover

'All Quiet on the Western Front for our era' New Statesman

Kien’s job is to search the Jungle of Screaming Souls for corpses. This book is his attempt to understand the eleven years of his life he gave to a senseless war.

Based on true experiences of Bao Ninh and banned by the communist party, this novel is revered as the ‘All Quiet on the Western Front for our era’.

Kien’s job is to search the Jungle of Screaming Souls for corpses. He knows the area well – this was where, in the dry season of 1969, his battalion was obliterated by American napalm and helicopter gunfire. Kien was one of only ten survivors. This book is his attempt to understand the eleven years of his life he gave to a senseless war.

Based on true experiences of Bao Ninh and banned by the communist party, this novel is revered as the ‘All Quiet on the Western Front for our era’.

20 years on, [it] had an even greater impact on me than it did first time around... It is a remarkable and important novel -- Jamie Byng * Herald *
The Sorrow of War 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 abut much more than war. A book about writing, about lost youth, it is also a beautiful agonising love story... a magnificent achievement
This hauntingly beautiful novel, written by a North Vietnamese Army veteran, manages to humanise completely a people who up until now have usually been cast as robotic fanatics
Unputdownable... This book should be required reading for anyone in American politics or policy-making. It should win the Pulitzer Prize, but it won't. It's too gripping for that

  • Winner of Independent Foreign Fiction Award 1994

ISBN: 9780749397111

Dimensions: 196mm x 128mm x 22mm

Weight: 180g

240 pages