Historical Fiction · DarkA South Vietnamese captain is secretly a communist spy, and flees to California
The Sympathizer
A double agent flees Saigon for America, and keeps reporting to the other side
The narrator is a communist double agent, a man of two minds, half French and half Vietnamese, who serves as a captain in the South Vietnamese army. After the fall of Saigon in 1975 he emigrates to America and lives among Vietnamese refugees in Los Angeles, while secretly reporting to his communist superiors in Vietnam. The whole novel is his written confession, an espionage story about identity, love, friendship and betrayal.
More about this book
Who
An unnamed narrator, half Vietnamese and half French, who serves as an aide to a South Vietnamese general. He is also a secret communist agent.
World
It opens in Saigon in 1975, in the final weeks of the war, and follows the aftermath of the war, including life among refugees in America.
What makes it different
The narrator is writing a confession for his captors, so the whole book is a flashback shaped by that frame, and he comments on his own story as he tells it. It is Nguyen's debut novel, published forty years to the month after the fall of Saigon, and a sequel, The Committed, followed in 2021.
Feel
A spy novel and war novel with metafiction, mystery and a dark comic tone. Its themes include the narrator's double identity and the Americanization of the Vietnam War in literature. It won the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the Edgar Award for Best First Novel.