Guernica Editions
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Lotusland
Guernica Editions, Spring 2015
334 pages
Trade Paperback
ISBN13: 9781550719307
ISBN10: 1550719300
$20.00 Canada, $20.00 US
Read more from the Essential Prose Series
Nathan Monroe is a 28-year-old American living in Saigon who falls in love with a poor but talented Vietnamese painter. When he fails to protect their love from her desperate chase for a better life in America, his safety net appears in the form of Anthony, an old domineering friend in Hanoi who hires Nathan at his real estate firm. Only much later does Nathan discover that Anthony has intended all along for him to take over his job and family so that he, too, can escape and start his life over in America. Lotusland dramatizes the power imbalances between Westerners living abroad and between Westerners and Vietnamese -- in love and friendship, in the consequences of war, and in the pursuit of dreams.
Her age was hard to guess, though she was young, between 20 and 25. The more he looked at her hair the more its shape came to resemble that of a rosebud: it enfolded her face so that the ends nearly met beneath her chin.
Tender, brutal, authentic, Lotusland captures the romance, disenchantment, and discoveries of expats living high and low in Vietnam. Joiner weaves a fine story.
Andrew X. Pham, author of Catfish and Mandala and Eaves of Heaven
Lotusland transports readers far away from narratives about the Vietnam War. David Joiner takes Vietnam as many people have come to know it and shows what it’s like today. A wonderful, important debut.
– Le Ly Hayslip, author of When Heaven and Earth Changed Places and Child of War, Woman of Peace
Books by David Joiner
