2024 Gordon Bowker Volcano Prize (shortlist)
2024 Somerset Maugham Award
2023 Waterstones Debut Fiction Prize (nominee)
One of Time Magazine's Must-Read Books of the Year
Longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal of Excellence in Fiction 2024
Longlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction 2023
“A deeply humane and genre-defying work of love and uncompromising hope.” —Ocean Vuong, author of On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous and Time Is a Mother
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 centers and then, later, in a modernizing London plagued by social inequality. Anh works in a factory to pay the bills. Minh loiters about with fellow high school dropouts. Thanh, the youngest, plays soccer with his friends after class. As they mature, each sibling reckons with survivor’s guilt, unmoored by their parents’ absence. And with every choice, their paths diverge further, until it’s unclear if love alone can keep them together.
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.
Genre: Literary Fiction
Longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal of Excellence in Fiction 2024
Longlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction 2023
“A deeply humane and genre-defying work of love and uncompromising hope.” —Ocean Vuong, author of On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous and Time Is a Mother
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 centers and then, later, in a modernizing London plagued by social inequality. Anh works in a factory to pay the bills. Minh loiters about with fellow high school dropouts. Thanh, the youngest, plays soccer with his friends after class. As they mature, each sibling reckons with survivor’s guilt, unmoored by their parents’ absence. And with every choice, their paths diverge further, until it’s unclear if love alone can keep them together.
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.
Genre: Literary Fiction
Praise for this book
"Meticulously researched and beautifully imagined, Wandering Soul is a deeply affecting debut, a restless inquiry into the nature of loss, kinship and survival." - Tash Aw
"Clear-hearted and moving, Wandering Souls tells one of the most important stories of our times, and you can feel, as you read, all it has taken Pin to write it." - Lucy Caldwell
"Wandering Souls is deeply moving and deeply generous. Pin writes about the Vietnamese diaspora in the UK - its past and its present - with love and care. I cried reading it." - Yara Rodrigues Fowler
"This deeply affecting novel charts one family's displacement, estrangement, and return: loss passed on like an inheritance to successive generations. Wandering Souls is more than testament, more than fiction. I am full of admiration." - Jeet Thayil
"A debut in name only, Wandering Souls is an astute and sure-footed excavation of family, selfhood, and loss in the shadow of colonial violence. It is also a deeply humane and genre-defying work of love and uncompromising hope through a long-overdue portrayal of Vietnamese life in the UK. A mighty achievement." - Ocean Vuong
"Clear-hearted and moving, Wandering Souls tells one of the most important stories of our times, and you can feel, as you read, all it has taken Pin to write it." - Lucy Caldwell
"Wandering Souls is deeply moving and deeply generous. Pin writes about the Vietnamese diaspora in the UK - its past and its present - with love and care. I cried reading it." - Yara Rodrigues Fowler
"This deeply affecting novel charts one family's displacement, estrangement, and return: loss passed on like an inheritance to successive generations. Wandering Souls is more than testament, more than fiction. I am full of admiration." - Jeet Thayil
"A debut in name only, Wandering Souls is an astute and sure-footed excavation of family, selfhood, and loss in the shadow of colonial violence. It is also a deeply humane and genre-defying work of love and uncompromising hope through a long-overdue portrayal of Vietnamese life in the UK. A mighty achievement." - Ocean Vuong
Visitors also looked at these books
Used availability for Cecile Pin's Wandering Souls