On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous (Paperback)

Written as a letter from a son to a mother who cannot read it, Ocean Vuong's first novel moves between a Hartford nail salon, a Vietnamese childhood and a tobacco farm in Connecticut. The narrator, called Little Dog, works backwards through his grandmother's memories of war, his mother's temper and exhaustion, and his own first relationship, assembling a family history out of fragments rather than along a straight line. Vuong came to fiction from poetry and the sentences show it, with the book arranged in short sections that hold up on their own. The Vintage paperback runs to 256 pages and deals directly with addiction, violence and grief, which places it with adult readers rather than younger ones. Before opening it: • An epistolary structure addressed to the narrator's mother • Three generations covered, from wartime Vietnam to Connecticut • A poet's prose broken into short, self-contained sections • Adult subject matter including addiction, violence and grief Suited to readers of literary fiction and autobiographical novels, published by Vintage and available at Boipoka.