A Find

I'd somehow managed never to have heard of Viet Thanh Nguyen, the winner of the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, before finding myself in possession of a copy of his prize-winning novel The Sympathizer - a Teachers' Day gift from a colleague. The blurb features comparisons to Greene, Conrad and Le Carre and a reference to Catch 22, and I can see why, though all of these are misleading to some degree. Nguyen is very much his own man.

I'm just over halfway in and thinking that this is one of the best novels I've read for the last few years. The opening chapters on the fall of Saigon effortlessly hooked me - and it's the seemingly effortless ease of the narrative that strikes me. There's no sense at all of a writer trying hard to impress even as he's deeply impressing.