The Sympathizer

I admit that when I open a book and find it has no dialogue, I feel like I'm a sixth grader all over again, made to read A Tale of Two Cities against my will (it took me a long time to learn to love Dickens). But The Sympathizer, long paragraphs and all, absorbed me immediately. It is a dialogue, but a one-sided one: a confession from a man of divided identity and loyalties, a biracial spy for the Viet Cong who escaped the fall of South Vietnam for exile in California and then returned. For all the "Vietnam novels" we've had, this is a new perspective for American readers, a fascinating story, which starts as satire but turns dark, of the way the war ended for Americans but continued for Vietnamese at home and abroad.