Wandering Souls

5 hrs. 30 min.

Language Russian

Author Cécile Pin

Narrator Irina Orlova

Description

“I’m trying to build a story between horror and a fairy tale, to find even a glimpse of truth.” The novel takes place in the late 1970s in Vietnam, when the Fan family decides to emigrate. Part of the children—the older sister An and the two brothers Minh and Thanh—leave first, expecting to reunite with the family in a refugee camp in Hong Kong. This plan collapses: a sudden tragedy leaves the three children orphaned, and sixteen-year-old An overnight becomes the nanny for her younger brothers. Soon all three immigrate to Thatcher-era Britain, where there isn’t much work and foreigners don’t feel like welcome guests. This is a sad story about orphans trying to survive in an unfamiliar, gloomy country; about their journey from an immigrant camp to municipal housing, their search for work, their sense of being adrift and separated by the crushing guilt of survival. “Wandering Souls” is an incredibly powerful debut novel about love, loss, emigration, and the consequences of colonialism. For fans of the books “The Sympathizer” by Viet Thanh Nguyen and ““The Love Boat,” Taipei” by Abigail Hing Wen.