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Book Club TONIGHT: 8pm 13th June 'The Sympathizer'

For our next book we'll be reading the 2016 Pulitzer Prize winning 'The Sympathizer' by Viet Thanh Nguyen.

Meet at 8pm in the Brave Sir Robin.

New members always welcome!

'The Sympathizer'
A tragicomic story of a South Vietnamese captain--a man brought up by an absent French father and a poor Vietnamese mother, a man who went to university in America--who returns to Vietnam to fight for the Communist cause.

Reviews:
"Tremendously funny, with a demanding verbal texture . . . Both tender and a bit of a romp, the book reminded me of how big books can be."--Guardian (Best Books of 2015)

"Extraordinary . . . Surely a new classic of war fiction. . . . [Nguyen] has wrapped a cerebral thriller around a desperate expat story that confronts the existential dilemmas of our age. . . . Laced with insight on the ways nonwhite people are rendered invisible in the propaganda that passes for our pop culture. . . . I haven't read anything since Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four that illustrates so palpably how a patient tyrant, unmoored from all humane constraint, can reduce a man's mind to liquid."--Washington Post

"The great achievement of The Sympathizer is that it gives the Vietnamese a voice and demands that we pay attention. Until now, it's been largely a one-sided conversation--or at least that's how it seems in American popular culture . . . We've never had a story quite like this one before. . . . [Nguyen] has a great deal to say and a knowing, playful, deeply intelligent voice . . . There are so many passages to admire. Mr. Nguyen is a master of the telling ironic phrase and the biting detail, and the book pulses with Catch-22-style absurdities."--New York Times

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