New Bites: The Zenith by Duong Thu Huong

A major new novel from the most important Vietnamese author writing today.



Duong Thu Huong's The Zenith is her fifth novel to be published in America. It is an ambitious, powerful, multilayered book that juxtaposes three stories:  the story before and during the Vietnam War of the life and rise to power of Chairman Ho Chi Minh and his comrades at arms; the story of an elder in a small Vietnamese village town who dominates his village only to find that his own sons covet his fortune; and the story of the Chairman's wife's brother-in-law.



The Zenith is one of the most important novels written yet about the Vietnam War. In using fiction to tell the story of the War, Huong illuminates and captures the moral conscience of the Vietnamese leaders more brilliantly and more precisely than any journalist or academic historian has done to date.  She brings out into the open the darkness at the core of Vietnamese Communism and brings out the soul of the Vietnamese themselves