The Graphic Memoirs
For readers who want the Vietnamese and Vietnamese American experience told through both image and words, graphic memoirs offer something that prose alone cannot always deliver. The emotions arrive through the art before the words even land, and all three authors in this section use that quality with extraordinary skill.
Vietnamerica: A Family's Journey - GB Tran (2011)
GB Tran was born in South Carolina in 1976, a year after his parents fled Vietnam during the fall of Saigon. He grew up largely disconnected from that history until his last surviving grandparents died within months of each other, and he traveled to Vietnam for the first time to piece together a story he had never been told.
The graphic memoir that came out of that process weaves two timelines together: his parents' and grandparents' lives in Vietnam across decades of war and colonial occupation, and his own journey as he assembles a family history that was kept from him his entire life. Time Entertainment named it one of the Top 10 Graphic Memoirs of All Time, and the Society of Illustrators awarded it a Gold Medal in Sequential Art. Library Journal compared it to Art Spiegelman's Maus and called it a book that belongs in all public and academic libraries. Published by Penguin Random House.
The Best We Could Do - Thi Bui (2017)
Thi Bui's graphic memoir begins with her becoming a mother for the first time, and from that threshold she works backward into her own parents' history with honesty and care that very few writers manage. The book traces her family's escape from Vietnam after the fall of Saigon, the years of displacement, and the long process of building a life in America while carrying everything the old life left behind. It won the American Book Award and was a National Book Critics Circle finalist. For anyone who has ever tried to understand their parents as full human beings rather than just as parents, this book goes directly to the heart of that experience. Published by Abrams ComicArts.
The Magic Fish - Trung Le Nguyen / Trungles (2020)
Trung Le Nguyen was born in a refugee camp in the Philippines and grew up in Minnesota. His debut graphic novel follows Tiến, a Vietnamese American teenager who reads fairy tales with his immigrant mother as a way of bridging the language gap between them, while quietly searching for the Vietnamese words to come out to his family as gay.
The book uses three different color palettes to move between three layers of reality: the present day story, the fairy tales the characters share, and his mother's memories of Vietnam. It won the 2021 Harvey Award for Book of the Year and was named one of the Best Books of the Year by the New York Public Library, Kirkus Reviews, Booklist, and Publishers Weekly. Published by Random House Graphic.
Books for Young Readers
Minh Lê - Drawn Together, Lift, The Blur
Minh Lê is a Vietnamese American author whose picture books have reached millions of young readers across the United States. Drawn Together (2018) is a nearly wordless picture book about a boy and his grandfather who cannot speak the same language but find deep connection through their shared love of drawing and storytelling. Illustrated by Caldecott Medal winner Dan Santat, it won a Caldecott Honor and speaks directly to the experience of diaspora children navigating the gap between their world and their grandparents' world.
His other titles include Lift (2020), about a girl who discovers she can lift anything with the right attitude, and The Blur (2022), about a boy who learns that slowing down helps him connect more deeply with the people around him. All three are published by Disney-Hyperion.
Jamie Jo Hoang - My Father, the Panda Killer and My Mother, the Mermaid Chaser
Jamie Jo Hoang is the daughter of Vietnamese refugees who grew up in Orange County, California. Although technically young adult fiction rather than picture books, her two companion novels are some of the most emotionally powerful Vietnamese American stories available for teenage readers today.
My Father, the Panda Killer (2023) is a coming-of-age story told in two alternating voices: a California teenager trying to understand her Vietnamese father's violent anger, and that same father as an eleven-year-old boy making a harrowing refugee journey from Vietnam to the United States. The two timelines speak to each other across generations until the full picture of inherited trauma and love comes together. It was named one of NPR's Books We Love.
My Mother, the Mermaid Chaser (2025) is the companion novel, following Paul, the younger brother from the first book, on a trip to Vietnam where he searches for the truth about the mother who abandoned his family. His mother's own story, told in parallel, reveals a woman shaped by loss and survival in ways her children never knew. It was a Los Angeles Times Book Prizes finalist and received a starred review from School Library Journal. Both books are published by Penguin Random House.
Literary Fiction and Novels
Daughters of the New Year - E.M. Tran (2022)
E.M. Tran is a Vietnamese American writer from New Orleans, and her debut novel draws directly on the Vietnamese zodiac and the specific texture of Vietnamese immigrant life in the American South.
The story begins in present-day New Orleans with Xuan Trung, a former beauty queen turned refugee after the Fall of Saigon, whose obsession with divining her daughters' fates through their Vietnamese zodiac signs collides completely with the very American lives her three daughters have built. The novel then moves backward in time through Hurricane Katrina, through the fall of Saigon, through the French occupation of Vietnam, and into a near-mythic past to trace the full arc of the Trung women across generations. It was selected as One Book One New Orleans' 2025 community-wide reading selection.
All That's Left Unsaid - Tracey Lien (2022)
Tracey Lien is a Vietnamese Australian journalist and novelist who grew up in Cabramatta, Sydney, the suburb with the largest Vietnamese community in Australia. Her debut novel is set in 1990s Cabramatta during the height of the suburb's heroin epidemic and follows Ky Tran, a young journalist who returns home after her younger brother is brutally murdered at a graduation dinner, and finds that every witness in a full restaurant claims to have seen nothing.
The novel uses the shape of a literary mystery to examine something much larger: the silence of an immigrant community that has learned not to trust authorities, the weight of generational trauma, and what it costs to grow up Vietnamese in a society that was not always welcoming. Liane Moriarty called it an unforgettable debut. Publishers Weekly gave it a starred review. It was longlisted for the Stella Prize. Published by William Morrow.
The Fortunes of Jaded Women - Carolyn Huynh (2022)
Carolyn Huynh grew up in Orange County, California, as the youngest daughter of Vietnamese refugees. Her debut novel is set in Little Saigon and follows three generations of Vietnamese American women living under a family curse that began when an ancestor left her arranged marriage for love and her furious mother-in-law hired a witch to curse all of her descendants to never find happiness or give birth to sons. When a psychic tells the eldest sister that this year will bring a wedding, a funeral, and the birth of a son, the feuding mothers and daughters are forced to reunite for the first time in a decade.
The novel is funny and emotionally honest about Vietnamese American family life in a way that feels genuinely true rather than performed for an outside audience. It was a Good Morning America book club pick and one of NPR's best books of 2022. The book is currently being translated for publication in Vietnam through the Vietnam Women Publishing House. Published by Simon and Schuster.
The Gangster We Are All Looking For - Lê Thi Diem Thúy (2003)
Lê Thi Diem Thúy was born in Phan Thiết, southern Vietnam, and left by boat with her father in 1978, eventually settling in San Diego.
Her debut novel is a fragmented, lyrical account of a young Vietnamese girl whose family arrived in California as refugees and navigates life between memory, loss, and the immigrant experience. The novel moves back and forth between Vietnam and America, between childhood and adulthood, and uses water as a central image throughout, which is deeply appropriate given that in Vietnamese, the words for water and for homeland are the same word.
Summer Rolls - Tuyen Do / Tuyền Đỗ (2025)
Tuyen Do is a British Vietnamese actor and writer whose debut play Summer Rolls was the first British Vietnamese story ever staged in the United Kingdom.
Her debut novel, adapted from that play, tells the parallel stories of Mai, a first-generation British Vietnamese teenager growing up in 1990s London, and her mother Trinh, who fled Vietnam as a refugee and carries buried trauma that quietly shapes everything about their relationship. The two timelines speak to each other across decades until the secrets between them finally surface.
Fantasy and Speculative Fiction
Nghi Vo - The Empress of Salt and Fortune, The Chosen and the Beautiful, Into the Riverlands
Nghi Vo is one of the most decorated Vietnamese American writers working in any genre today, and her books represent something genuinely new: Vietnamese identity placed at the center of fantasy and speculative fiction worlds not as a background detail but as the heart of the story.
The Empress of Salt and Fortune (2020) is the first book in her Singing Hills Cycle series, following a wandering cleric who documents the story of an exiled foreign princess through the memories of those who served her. It won the Hugo Award for Best Novella, one of the highest honors in science fiction and fantasy, and also won the IAFA Crawford Award.
The Chosen and the Beautiful (2021) is her debut novel, reimagining The Great Gatsby entirely from the perspective of Jordan Baker, who in this version is a queer Vietnamese adoptee navigating 1920s New York society where magic, demons, and fae lurk at the edges of the Jazz Age world. It was an instant national bestseller and a Best of the Year pick for NPR.
Into the Riverlands (2022) is the third book in the Singing Hills Cycle, following the same cleric on a road journey through a landscape of ancient feuds and martial arts legends, examining how stories change with every retelling. It was nominated for the Hugo Award. All three books are published by Tor.
Memoir
Sigh, Gone: A Misfit's Memoir of Great Books, Punk Rock, and the Fight to Fit In - Phuc Tran (2020)
Phuc Tran was a toddler when his family fled Vietnam in 1975 and landed by chance in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, a small town where the Tran family were the only Vietnamese family for years.
His memoir is a coming-of-age story about surviving racism, navigating the expectations of immigrant parents, and finding belonging through two unlikely guides, classic literature and 1980s punk rock. Each chapter is structured around a book he read in high school, from The Metamorphosis to The Scarlet Letter to The Iliad, using the themes of those books to examine his own experience of displacement and identity.
The Literature of War and Its Aftermath
The Sympathizer and The Refugees - Viet Thanh Nguyen
Viet Thanh Nguyen is the first Vietnamese American author to win the Pulitzer Prize, which he received for The Sympathizer in 2016. He was born in Vietnam and came to the United States as a refugee at the age of four.
The Sympathizer is a novel narrated by a communist spy embedded in the South Vietnamese army, written as a confession to an unnamed commandant after the war. It is one of the most politically sharp and formally ambitious Vietnamese American novels ever written, examining the Vietnam War from a Vietnamese perspective that mainstream American culture has rarely made space for. Published by Grove Press. Available in Vietnamese translation as Cảm Tình Viên from Nhã Nam.
The Refugees is a short story collection dedicated simply to the refugees, everywhere, following Vietnamese families and individuals navigating life between two worlds after the war. It was the first of his works to be translated and published in Vietnam.
Food as Literature
Ăn Chưa: Simple Vietnamese Recipes That Taste Like Home - Julie Mai Trần
Julie Mai Trần is a first-generation Vietnamese Chinese American and the creator of the food blog Share My Roots.
Her debut cookbook is built around the Vietnamese greeting "Ăn chưa?" which means "Did you eat yet?" and which functions as a way of saying I love you in every Vietnamese household without using those exact words.
The book contains over 75 recipes from Northern, Central, and Southern Vietnamese cooking traditions, with family stories and cultural context woven through every page so that it reads as much like a memoir as a cookbook. We are proud to already carry this title at vietbookstore.com.
Romance with Vietnamese American Characters
Happy Endings, Full Exposure, and Something Cheeky - Thien Kim
Thien Kim reached out directly in our comments to ask if Viet Bookstore would carry her Vietnamese American romance novels. We think that is exactly the kind of conversation this collection was built to have.
Vietnamese American love stories deserve shelf space, and romance as a genre has historically been one of the first places where underrepresented communities find themselves reflected in mainstream fiction. We are reaching out to her directly to learn more and explore stocking her titles.
A note on WHO gets visibility
What this exercise reminded us most clearly is that the Vietnamese literary community already knows its own writers. Our followers did not need a list handed to them. They had already found these authors, read their books, and were quietly passing them on to each other for years before any of them showed up on a mainstream bestseller list.
The question is not whether Vietnamese writers are producing extraordinary work, because they clearly are, across every genre, in every format, at every stage of their careers. The question is whether the bookstores and libraries and publications around them are doing their part to make that work easy to find.
This collection is our attempt to do our part. It will keep growing as long as the community keeps sharing, and we will keep reaching out to every author on this list to bring their work to vietbookstore.com.
If there is an author you recommended who we have not yet mentioned here, please drop their name in the comments. This blog will be updated as the collection grows.
Follow us on Instagram at @vietbookstoreinus for updates as new titles arrive.
