Winner of the PEN Translates Award 2024

After an eight-year hiatus, Nguyễn Ngọc Tư returns with her second novel. Mesmerizing, poignant, lyrical, and existential, yet claustrophobic, Water: A Chronicle encapsulates the beauty of contemporary Vietnamese writing.

At the heart of this watery chronicle is a dual mystery: a holy man on an island empire and a desperate mother seeking his heart to cure her child. This mosaic novel, composed of nine stories, circles this enigma like river currents, carrying fragments of myth and life from the great river.

A trans woman who longs to be whole, a shadow bride yearning for flesh, a madwoman with a colicky infant, and a woman who eats words to protect her child from a fly apocalypse… The ghosts and ghouls reflecting on the water’s surface may be the everyday reality of river life—or the universal haunting of womanhood.