The Committed (Hardcover) | Released: 04 Mar 2021

Product Description'Call The Committed many things. A white hot literary thriller disguised as a searing novel of ideas. An unflinching look at redemption and damnation. An unblinking examination of the dangers of belief, and the need to believe. A sequel that goes toe to toe with the original then surpasses it. A masterwork' Marlon James, Booker Prize-winning author of A Brief History of Seven KillingsThe long-awaited new novel from one of America's most highly regarded contemporary writers, The Committed follows the Sympathizer as he arrives in Paris as a refugee. There he and his blood brother Bon try to escape their pasts and prepare for their futures by turning their hands to capitalism in one of its purest forms: drug dealing. No longer in physical danger, but still inwardly tortured by his reeducation at the hands of his former best friend, and struggling to assimilate into a dominant culture, the Sympathizer is both charmed and disturbed by Paris. As he falls in with a group of left-wing intellectuals and politicians who frequent dinner parties given by his French Vietnamese "aunt," he finds not just stimulation for his mind but also customers for his merchandise - but the new life he is making has dangers he has not foreseen, from the oppression of the state, to the self-torture of addiction, to the seemingly unresolvable paradox of how he can reunite his two closest friends, men whose worldviews put them in absolute opposition.Both literary thriller and brilliant novel of ideas, The Committed is a blistering portrayal of commitment and betrayal that will cement Viet Thanh Nguyen's position in the firmament of American letters.'Here it is, with perfect timing, a novel that anyone who is part of a colonising or colonised nation - and that includes, of course, America - should read . . . Nguyen is a craftsman . . . And then there's the sharp humour . . . Like The Sympathizer, it amounts to much more than the sum of its parts. These two novels constitute a powerful challenge to an enduring narrative of colonialism and neo-colonialism. One waits to see what Nguyen, and the man of two faces, will do next' the Guardian'If The Sympathizer was ostensibly a spy novel, then The Committed is a gangland thriller . . . Two contemporary classics for your bedside table' The Telegraph, five star reviewReviewCallThe Committed many things. A white hot literary thriller disguised as a searing novel of ideas. An unflinching look at redemption and damnation. An unblinking examination of the dangers of belief, and the need to believe.A sequel that goes toe to toe with the original then surpasses it. A masterwork. ?Marlon James, Booker Prize-winning author of A Brief History of Seven KillingsThis follow-up to his seminalThe Sympathizer isNguyen at his most ambitious and bold. Fierce in tone, capacious, witty, sharp, and deeply researched,The Committed marks, not just a sequel to its groundbreaking predecessor, but a sum total accumulation of a life devoted to Vietnamese American history and scholarship. This novel, like all daring novels, is a Trojan Horse, whose hidden power is a treatise of global futurity in the aftermath of colonial conquest. It asks questions central both to Vietnamese everywhere - and to our very species: How do we live in the wake of seismic loss and betrayal? And, perhaps even more critically, How do we laugh? ?Ocean Vuong, New York Times-bestselling author of On Earth We?re Briefly GorgeousAbrilliant rollercoaster of ideas and action. ?Daily MailAn elegy to idealism, Orientalism, and existentialism in all its tragic forms, Nguyen's novel doesn't so much inhabit early eighties Paris, as it pulls the plug on the City of Light. Think ofThe Committed as the declaration of the 20th ½ Arrondissement. A squatter's paradise for those with one foot in the grave and the other shoved halfway up Western civilization's ass. ?Paul Beatty, author of the Man Booker prize-winning The SelloutThe Committ