Viet Thanh Nguyen - O Simpatizante

Winner of the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction

“However, in the month in which this confession begins, my way of looking at the world still resembled a virtue more than a danger, which is how certain dangers begin to show themselves.”

April 1975: Saigon is plunged into chaos. In his villa, a South Vietnamese army general drinks whiskey and, with the help of his trusted captain, draws up a list of the names of those who are allowed to take the last flights out of the country.

Starting a new life in Los Angeles, the general and his compatriots are unaware that among them is a spy who reports their activities to higher command levels in the Viet Cong.

"The Sympathizer" is the story of this spy, this captain: a man raised by an absent French father and a poor Vietnamese mother, a man who went to university in the US, and who returned to Vietnam to fight for the communist cause. In the best tradition of spy novels, these pages explore a life between two worlds, between friendship and political belief, loyalty and identity, revealing the legacy that the Vietnam War left in literature, cinema, and also in the wars that are still being fought.