Victoria’s Book Reviews: Wandering Souls by Cecile Pin

Longlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction 2023

“There are the goodbyes and then the fishing out of the bodies—everything in between is speculation."

After the last American troops leave Vietnam, siblings Anh, Minh, and Thanh journey to Hong Kong with the promise that their parents and younger siblings will soon follow. But when tragedy strikes, the three children are left orphaned, and sixteen-year-old Anh becomes the caretaker for her two younger brothers overnight.

In the years that follow, Anh and her brothers immigrate to the UK, living first in overcrowded camps and resettlement centres and then, later, in a modernizing London plagued by social inequality.

Told through lyrical narrative threads, historical research, voices from lost family, and notes by an unnamed narrator determined to chart these siblings’ fates, Wandering Souls captures the lives of a family marked by loss yet relentless in the pursuit of a better future. With urgency and precision, it affirms that the most important stories are those we claim for ourselves, establishing Cecile Pin as a masterful new literary voice.

[cmleidi]

Thank you for the review. I also thought it was a wonderful novel. I was struck by the empathetic writing and how Pin places their experiences in the context of the social and political climate of the time.