Fishing for Tigers

Six years ago, Mischa Reese left her abusive husband and suffocating life in California and reinvented herself in steamy, chaotic Hanoi. In Vietnam, she finds satisfying work and enjoys a life of relative luxury and personal freedom.

Thirty-five and single, Mischa believes that romance and passion are for teenagers; a view with which her cynical, promiscuous expat friends agree. But then a friend introduces Mischa to his visiting eighteen-year-old son. Cal is a strikingly attractive Vietnamese-Australian boy, but he's resentful of his father, and of the nation which has stolen him away.

His beauty and righteous idealism awaken something in Mischa and the two launch into an affair that threatens Mischa's friendships and reputation and challenges her sense of herself as unselfish and good.

Set among the louche world of Hanoi's expatriate community, Fishing for Tigers is about a woman struggling with the morality of finding peace in a war-haunted city, personal fulfilment in the midst of poverty and sexual joy with a vulnerable youth.

About the Author

Emily Maguire is the author of the novels Smoke in the Room (2009), The Gospel According to Luke (2006) and the international bestseller Taming the Beast (2004). Emily has been twice highly commended for the Kathleen Mitchell Award for writers under 30 and was a finalist for the 2006 Dylan Thomas Prize. In 2010 she was named as a Sydney Morning Herald Young Novelist of the Year. She is the recipient of the 2011 NSW Writer’s Fellowship.