Viet Thanh Nguyen - Refugiados

"Those invaders had come to conquer our land, and now they would never return home. Listening to those women with dark eyes, I trembled with pleasure in the darkness, and it seemed to me that I would never be able to tell stories like those."

A Vietnamese refugee who experiences a violent culture shock upon finding himself living with a homosexual couple in San Francisco; a woman whose demented husband mistakes her for a former lover; a girl from Ho Chi Minh City who reunites with her sister, recently arrived from the United States, for whom, unlike him, everything has worked out—all of them are echoes of a world where seemingly tenuous borders are difficult walls to cross.

In this collection of short stories, written over twenty years, Pulitzer Prize winner Viet Thanh Nguyen gives voice to those who, by flight or dream, live between two worlds: the place where they were born and the country where they are. Timely, direct, and of rare sensitivity, "Refugees" is a precious exploration of issues surrounding identity, love, and family.