Dragonfish - Tapa blanda

[A] hard-hitting debut novel.... [Suzy is] a mystery no one can solve, particularly the people turning all their efforts in the wrong direction. But while their efforts aren't fruitful, they're absorbing. And they speak to the way everyone is a bit of an enigma to other people, no matter how many words they put into the effort to be understood.

Everything is perfect there, those quiet little garnishes of idiosyncratic detail are gifts, both amusing and full of character. Tran's novel is filled with this sort of inspired meticulousness, and reading it is to enter its world.

Well-handled and tautly told...[A] strong first novel for its risk taking, for its collapsing of genre, for its elegant language and its mediation of a history that is integral to post-1960s American identity yet often ignored.--Chris Abani

Heartbreaking and haunting.

Transfixing...Like such writers as Caryl Phillips, Dinaw Mengestu and Edwidge Danticat, [Tran] is devoted to capturing the immigrant experience and widening everyone's understanding of its particular as well as universal truths.--Lloyd Sachs

A superb debut novel...that takes the noir basics and infuses them with the bitters of loss and isolation peculiar to the refugee and immigrant tale.--Maureen Corrigan

Absolutely gripping. Vu Tran has written a terrific--and deceptively weird--novel that manages to make Vietnam and Las Vegas feel like old, familiar friends. Don't call him a writer to watch. Call him a writer to read.--Tom Bissell, author of The Father of All Things

Unable to forget the mysterious Vietnamese wife who left him and blackmailed by her second husband into searching for her, a rugged Oakland cop infiltrates the sleazy gambling dens of Las Vegas to uncover his ex's painful past in a Malaysian refugee camp.