In celebration of the month of love, I thought I’d share with you some stunning debuts by BIPOC and/or exophonic authors I had come across recently, whose stories I fell head over heels in love with!

Unbound: A Tale of Love and Betrayal in Shanghai by Dina Gu Brumfield

A page-turner with great characters, ‘Unbound’ is a multigenerational story of two strong-willed women, a grandmother and granddaughter who survived the odds despite their circumstances and their determination to live a life on their own terms amid political upheaval and the turmoil of war. Despite English being her second language, the author was able to weave a brilliant, well-written story that I found inspiring and uplifting. I really enjoyed simplicity of her writing, as it allowed me to be totally immersed in the story and characters. This is one of those books which I thought didn’t get enough recognition.

A Burning by Megha Majumdar

Looking for a quick, fast-paced read? Pick this one up. It was so good I had a hard time putting it down. We have 3 characters: Jivan, a Muslim girl living in the slums was accused of being involved in a terrorist attack; PT Sir, a gym teacher unexpectedly got roped in to being a politician, and one who reaped all benefits of being one; and Lovely, a hijra who had the chance of setting Jivan free, but at a cost. ‘A Burning’ is a little novel that packs a punch with laser-sharp storytelling and unforgettable characters. A dazzling debut! 

The Mountains Sing by Dr. Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai

Going into this book I didn’t know what to expect. And my, was I in for a heartbreaking, harrowing journey. This book should come with a box of tissues. ‘The Mountains Sing’ is a mesmerising family saga, covering four generations, that’s centred around the Great Famine, the Land Reform and the Vietnam War, told from the perspectives of Hương and her Grandma Diệu Lan. Diệu Lan was brought up in a wealthy farming family, The Trấn, in Nghe An Province. This is a book by another exophonic writer, whose lyrical prose I fell head over heels in love with. Not only her writing showed experience and depth, but also her passion for words and storytelling.

If I Had Your Face by Frances Cha

This book had a lasting impression on me. In Seoul, South Korea, we meet 5 women – Kyuri, a room salon girl; Miho, an emerging artist; Ara a hairstylist, Wonna, a pregnant lady in her forties, and Sujin, Ara’s former high school friend. Miho and Sujin were raised in an orphanage in Cheongju. Each story is told from their perspective, except Sujin, whose story we’ll know from the girls, except Wonna. ‘If I Had Your Face’ is a shocking and heartbreaking novel about beauty, patriarchy, sexism, class, filial piety and friendship, with characters so intricately drawn, you can’t help but to empathize with them and hold them dear to your heart. An unforgettable debut!

The Girl with The Louding Voice by Abi Daré

An unforgettable and inspiring novel about a 14-year-old girl, Adunni who not only lost her mother, but also her family, her friends, and most of all, her education and freedom to be who she is. She was raped by a man old enough to be her father, and bullied by his first wife. Only Khadija, the second wife, befriended her. Unfortunately, the friendship didn’t last and it devastated Adunni, and she was left to face the cruel world all alone. This story is about a girl who was faced with challenges after challenges, but like an inflatable punching bag, she kept bouncing back, again and again. The Girl with The Louding Voice is a compelling debut that will pull at your heartstrings.

Do you have any other recommendations? Tell us in the comments below!

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Thank you for reading my debut novel. It was launched into the coronavirus pandemic and my US/Canada book tour was cancelled. I am very thankful to anyone who reaches out and offers their support during this challenging time.

The Mountains Sing was fueled by my wish to have a grandmother. Both of my grandmas had died before my birth. Growing up, I was very jealous of my friends who had grandmothers to tell them tales and stories of their family. So I told myself I would write a novel one day with a grandmother figure in it. And finally I found Grandma Diệu Lan in The Mountains Sing.

I have no photos of my grandmothers and as I wrote the novel, I could imagine how my grandmothers looked, I could hear their voices. So yes, Grandma Diệu Lan is very real to me, as well as all other characters, including Hương, her parents, uncles and aunt. To bring these characters alive required a lot of work and attention to details, and that’s why it took me seven years to write and edit The Mountains Sing.

The novel is set in Hà Nội, the capital of Việt Nam and the city of my heart. I was not born there but worked there for many years. This is the city where I met the love of my life – my husband and gave birth to our two children. While in Hà Nội, I wrote my scooter or bicycle everyday to work, drank tea on the streets, mingled with elderly people who shared with me their stories, visited museums, art galleries. I did not know that all of these experiences were helping me prepare for The Mountains Sing, which I would write years later, after I had moved to Manila, Philippines. (My family has lived in many countries around the world since my husband works in development assistance.)

One of the things I was most captivated by in the novel were the relationships between the siblings and the divide between North and South Vietnam and how that tore apart mothers and children, siblings, etc. Is there anything further you can share on the realities of this that can help people who haven’t experienced something like that really understand the gravity of what that might have felt like—or continue to feel like for family’s impacted?

For many years, I wanted to write a book that encompasses the experiences of not just my family, but of others’ as well. I wanted to create a world which is authentically Vietnamese and fill it with Vietnamese characters, language, poetry, and culture. Yet I could not find a key to open the door to that world.

Then, in 2012, when I was traveling with a Vietnamese friend in a car, I asked him what it was like for him during the Việt Nam War. He told me that he was 12 years old when Hà Nội was targeted by B-52 bombers. His parents were in Russia at that time and he was living with his grandmother, who saved him from the bombing raids. His story moved me so much. When I went home that evening, after putting my two young children to bed, I sat down at my computer and googled about the bombings of Hà Nội. I heard audio broadcasts of the sirens warning citizens about bombing raids. With tears running down my face, I penned 2.000 words which eventually become the opening scene of The Mountains Sing. I wrote without knowing where the story would lead me.

But I knew I had to let Grandma Diệu Lan have many children, who would be separated by historical events which in turn lead them to becoming the enemy of one another. I have met too many Vietnamese families who were separated by the war and who ended up fighting against each other, just like the Trần family in The Mountains Sing.

Forty-five years after the war, tremendous progress has been made in terms of reconciliation between Việt Nam and the United States. But the wounds that divided Việt Nam and Vietnamese families, both at home and in the diaspora, remain profound and painful. For that reason, The Mountains Sing places our people at the center of the Việt Nam War in the hopes that we will be open to difficult but necessary conversations that can help one another heal.

Over the course of the story, I became very deeply connected to Trần Diệu Lan. Her relationship with Guava (Hương) was so intimate and so genuine that even on the other side of the page I felt like I could read my own grandmother into her voice. Who was the inspiration for this character?

Thank you so much for your kind words. My two grandmothers merge into one to become Grandma Diệu Lan. The Great Hunger’s event, for example, is inspired by the experiences of my father’s mother. She was killed in the Great Hunger of 1945. Her children were so hungry that she ventured into the village’s cornfield. She was caught and tied to corn plants. She was too weak to break away. My father knew the man who had killed his mother, and told me that after the Great Hunger, that man moved away from our village. I never knew what happened to that man so I created the character Wicked Ghost in The Mountains Sing. I showed the reader how Wicked Ghost was punished for what he’d done. But in the end, Wicked Ghost was forgiven somehow. In other words, this novel was my way of searching for healing, for forgiveness, because being able to forgive is the greatest gift that we can give ourselves.

This was your first English book. What was that process like? Did you find that the feelings and language you were expressing came across as you intended?

I have translated many books from Vietnamese into English and vice versa. Still, when I decided to write The Mountains Sing in English, it felt like climbing a mountain barefoot because I had never written a novel before. I had no plot for the book when I started writing it either.

But I wrote The Mountains Sing with the mindset of a Vietnamese who is fully aware of the importance of preserving the Vietnamese authenticity of her novel. My Vietnamese characters think and speak in Vietnamese, yet I had to transfer their thoughts and speech into English. My responsibility as a translator was to capture the Vietnamese essence of such expressions and not Westernize them.

I would like to thank readers of the book who accept the challenge of fully emerging themselves in Vietnamese culture by reading The Mountains Sing. It is not just diarictical marks, but you might have noticed that I do not always translate Vietnamese words. For example, early in the book, the reader learns that nón lá is a conical hat made of woven bamboo and palm leaves. After this explaination, I went to use nón lá without repeated explaination. It’s my intention to familiarise the reader with the Vietnamese culture as much as possible, so that hopefully by the end of the novel, they become a part of it.

I mentioned in my review that The Mountains Sing was/is one of the most moving novels I have ever read, and I want to repeat that and thank you again for sharing this story. Can you share more on the emotional journey of writing something so impactful?

Thank you so much for your kind words. I am so honored my novel found you.

It took me seven years to write and edit, hundreds of revisions, many sleepless nights, tears, and countless moments of doubt. I doubted that I was a good enough storyteller. I doubted my ability to express complicated thoughts and emotions in English. But I never doubted my decision in 2006 at the age of thirty-three to return to my dream of becoming a writer.

A few days ago, I listened to the audio book of The Mountains Sing, narrated beautifully by Quyen Ngo. As the book finished, I sat there and cried so hard, for so long. I cried for my grandmothers whom I never had the chance to meet. I miss them more than ever. And I cry every time I re-read the diary entries of Hương’s mother. Those entries represent the sorrow of hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese women whose husbands never return from the war.

The printed book is very beautiful, and I was overjoyed seeing my name, the names of all characters and all Vietnamese words and phrases in full diacritical marks. The Vietnamese language has suffered a lot of losses due to colonisation. Our language, when published outside of Việt Nam, is often stripped of diarictical marks to fit the Western eyes and ears. I am so pleased that I can undo some of the losses via The Mountains Sing.

I hope that while reading this novel, the reader will join me in embracing the values of peace, normality and family. All of us are currently fighting the war against coronavirus. I hope everybody with stay safe and healthy. May we rise against all challenges together and overcome all obstacles. May each family, community, country, and the whole world becomes stronger, more united than we have ever been.

Will you be picking up The Mountains Sing? Tell us in the comments below!

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The Mountains Sing is an epic, multi-generational narrative that traces the arc of Vietnam’s turbulent and painful twentieth century history as Que Mai gracefully weaves together the timeline of four generations of the Tran family—beginning during the Communist Land Reform of the 1950s and extending through the aftermath of the American bombing of Ha Noi in the early 1970s. Steeped in the storytelling traditions of Vietnam, The Mountains Sing is decadent and heart wrenching, equal parts lush and vibrant in its unfamiliar setting, and just as persistently unrelenting in its depiction of decades worth of war and conflict.

This story, although captivating and stunningly crafted, is nonetheless brutal, making its narration ring true in the heart of the reader—“The more I read, the more I became afraid of wars. Wars have the power to turn graceful and cultured people into monsters.”

Written as Que Mai’s response to single-sided, Western-written depictions of Vietnam as a place of war, simplicity, and cruelty, The Mountains Sing presents a story of history, of resiliency, and of hope as told through the indelible voices of the Tran family, alternating between the family’s matriarch, Tran Dieu Lan, and extending to her granddaughter, Huong. It is every bit a tale as much of painful desperation and the horrors of famine, war, and class struggle, as it is a moving lesson in hope, renewal, and the bond of family. “…I realized that war was monstrous. If it didn’t kill those it touched, it took away a piece of their souls, so they could never be whole again.”

Que Mai’s The Mountains Sing is a heartfelt inquiry into Vietnam’s past, a moving tribute to those who braved, endured, and perished during decades of upheaval and suffering, and, in the end, a novel that will simultaneously break your heart and mend it, a testament to both Que Mai’s storytelling and the strength of a people who never gave up, no matter how much was levied against them.

The Mountains Sing is available from Amazon, Book Depository, and other good book retailers as of March 17th 2020.

*On a personal note from this reviewer, The Mountains Sing may not have been a title the likes of which normally make its way into my library, but it has nonetheless found a place as one of the most moving, and fundamentally eye-opening, novels I feel I will read in my lifetime.

Will you be picking up The Mountains Sing? Tell us in the comments below!

Synopsis | Goodreads

With the epic sweep of Min Jin Lee’s Pachinko or Yaa Gyasi’s Homegoing and the lyrical beauty of Vaddey Ratner’s In the Shadow of the Banyan, The Mountains Sing tells an enveloping, multigenerational tale of the Tran family, set against the backdrop of the Viet Nam War. Tran Dieu Lan, who was born in 1920, was forced to flee her family farm with her six children during the Land Reform as the Communist government rose in the North. Years later in Hà Noi, her young granddaughter, Hương, comes of age as her parents and uncles head off down the Ho Chí Minh Trail to fight in a conflict that will tear not just her beloved country but her family apart.

Vivid, gripping, and steeped in the language and traditions of Viet Nam, The Mountains Sing brings to life the human costs of this conflict from the point of view of the Vietnamese people themselves, while showing us the true power of kindness and hope. This is celebrated Vietnamese poet Nguyen Phan Que Mai’s first novel in English.

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