The Committed

The long-awaited new novel from one of America's most highly regarded contemporary writers, The Committed follows the Sympathizer as he arrives in Paris as a refugee. There he & his blood brother Bon try to escape their pasts & prepare for their futures by turning their hands to capitalism in one of its purest forms: drug dealing. No longer in physical danger, but still inwardly tortured by his reeducation at the hands of his former best friend, & struggling to assimilate into a dominant culture, the Sympathizer is both charmed & disturbed by Paris.

As he falls in with a group of left-wing intellectuals & politicians who frequent dinner parties given by his French Vietnamese "aunt," he finds not just stimulation for his mind but also customers for his merchandise - but the new life he is making has dangers he has not foreseen, from the oppression of the state, to the self-torture of addiction, to the seemingly unresolvable paradox of how he can reunite his two closest friends, men whose worldviews put them in absolute opposition.

Both literary thriller & brilliant novel of ideas, The Committed is a blistering portrayal of commitment & betrayal that will cement Viet Thanh Nguyen's position in the firmament of American letters.

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Viet Thanh Nguyen’s novel The Sympathizer is a New York Times best seller & won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Other honors include the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, the Edgar Award for Best First Novel from the Mystery Writers of America, the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction from the American Library Association, the First Novel Prize from the Center for Fiction, a Gold Medal in First Fiction from the California Book Awards, & the Asian/Pacific American Literature Award from the Asian/Pacific American Librarian Association.

His other books are Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam & the Memory of War (a finalist for the National Book Award in nonfiction…