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“... The narrator​ of Viet ThanhNguyen’s pair of novels, The Sympathiser (2015) and The Committed, is one of the more irresistible characters in recent American fiction. He smokes, he drinks, he sniffs powders. He’s a playboy who sometimes can’t get it up. He’s a lowlife, a drug dealer, a street fighter ...”

“... novel, The Sympathiser, are clear-eyed and effective, uniform in length, evenly pitched in tone. Viet ThanhNguyen dedicates the book to ‘all refugees, everywhere’, but his focus is on those who came from Vietnam and settled in California. There are nuances of displacement, and in some ways the Vietnamese ...”

“... foreshadow, and Blasim’s name began to appear on festival line-ups and reading lists alongside Viet ThanhNguyen, Mohsin Hamid and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. A similar moment of celebrity is the engine of God 99. The book is a series of short stories, framed as interviews between the narrator (also called ...”

“... know about him was already in the public domain. Born in 1890 to a middle-ranking mandarin family, Nguyen Tat Thanh – the name he took at the age of ten – grew up in the village of Kim Lien in Nghe An province, a couple of hundred miles south of Hanoi. His father was a Confucian scholar who worked as an administrator ...”

“... Late Medieval and Early Modern absolutism in Europe about the same time. ‘The long reign of Le Thanh long (1460-97) marked the climax of the development,’ with the central apparatus and the bureaucracy trained on Confucian lines reinforced against ‘the oligarchic element’. There is a further odd parallelism between the troublous times that followed ...”