Excerpt from Dragonfish by Vu Tran, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

But after two years, I realized she had no interest in discovering me: my job, my friends, my love for baseball or cars or a nice steak and potato dinner. She hardly ever asked me about my family or my upbringing. She must have assumed, because of her silence about herself, that I was equally indifferent to my own past. She didn't know that until her I had not thought of Vietnam since 1973, when I was eighteen and the draft ended and saved me from the war, and that all of a sudden, decades later, this distant country—this vague alien idea from my youth—meant everything again, until she gradually embodied the place itself, the central mystery in my life. The least she could do was share her stories, like how happy her childhood had been and how the war upended everything, or what cruel assholes the Communists were, or how her uncle or father or neighbor had died in battle or survived a reeducation camp, or something. But she'd only say her life back home was "lonely" and "uninteresting," her voice muted with hesitation, like she was teaching me her language and I'd never get it anyway.

Gradually, an easy distance settled between us. I found I loved her most when she was sick and had no choice but to let me take care of her. Feed her. Give her medicine. Keep her housebound, which she rarely was for more than a day. And since I'd apparently reached the limit of what she was willing to give me, I grew fond of any situation where she'd talk about herself, even if it was her waking in the night from a bad dream and then, in the grip of her fright, waking me too so I could lie there in the darkness and listen to her recount it.

Excerpted from Dragonfish by Vu Tran. Copyright © 2015 by Vu Tran. With permission of the publisher, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. All rights reserved.