The Gangster We Are All Looking For

In 1978, six Vietnamese refugees were pulled from the sea just off California. In San Diego, a little girl's matter-of-fact innocence masks the ghostly traumas that still haunt her: the cataclysm that engulfed her homeland; the memory of a brother who drowned; the heartbreaking spectacle of her parents trying to make a new home, their struggle backlit by the memory of a forbidden love when they were young. lê thi diem thúy has revealed a world of great beauty and enormous sorrows. The Gangster We Are All Looking For is an authentically original novel about remembering and forgetting, about home and family, and about trying to find a place - and voice - in a new world.

'A beautiful, deeply moving story of a family. The more I read, the more I felt the family was mine' Jonathan Safran Foer, author of Everything is Illuminated

'lê's novel flows in luminous paragraphs that mingle past and present' VOGUE