Join us at Libreria, as we welcome superstar Vietnamese author Thuân, who is visiting the UK to discuss their recently translated book, Elevator in Sài Gòn.

Still banned in Vietnam, Elevator in Sài Gòn, published by Tilted Axis Press, is a suspenseful novel that is part detective story, historical romance, postcolonial ghost story and a biting satire of life in a communist state.

A Vietnamese woman living in Paris travels back to Sài Gòn for her estranged mother’s funeral. Her brother had recently built a new house and staged a grotesquely lavish ceremony for their mother to inaugurate what was rumoured to be the first elevator in a private home in the country.

But shortly after the ceremony, in the middle of the night, their mother dies after mysteriously falling down the elevator shaft. Following the funeral, the daughter becomes increasingly fascinated with her family’s history, and begins to investigate and track an enigmatic figure, Paul Polotsky, who emerges from her mother’s notebook. Like an amateur sleuth, she trails Polotsky through the streets of Paris, sneaking behind him as he goes about his usual routines.

Meanwhile, she researches her mother’s past – zigzagging across France and Vietnam – trying to find clues to the spiralling, deepening questions her mother left behind unanswered – and perhaps unanswerable.

Thuân’s prose, at once expansive and claustrophobic, haunts without weighing the reader down. Across Hanoi, Saigon, Paris, Pyongyang, and Seoul, our narrator attempts to force a sense of clarity into her past, but colonialism blurs history and scripts the very fabric of existence, trapping our narrator in a seemingly endless search. Thrilling, tragic, and at times hilarious, Elevator in Sài Gòn is a postcolonial ghost story, a political satire, and a romance that will linger in the psyche long after the final descent of the elevator.” —Sheung-King, author of You Are Eating an Orange. You Are Naked. and Batshit Seven.

Thuận was born in 1967 in Hanoi. She studied at Pyatigorsk University (Russia) and at la Sorbonne in Paris. She is the author of ten novels and a recipient of the Writers’ Union Prize, the highest award in Vietnamese literature. 7 of her novels were translated and published in France. Chinatown, her debut novel in English, won a PEN Translates Award, the 2023 ALTA National Translation Award, is the Runner-Up for TA First Translation Prize 2023, and was shortlisted for the 2023 Republic of Consciousness Prize. She currently lives in Paris.

Translator Nguyễn An Lý lives in Hochiminh City. She has over twenty translations into Vietnamese, published under various names and various genres. Chinatown by Thuân, her debut translation into English, won an English PEN Translates Award and the 2023 ALTA National Translation Award in Prose. She co-founds and co-edits the independent online Zzz Review.