The Committed

The Committed is a rich and exhilarating story of friendship, loyalty, and greed. Set in 1980s Paris, it follows the characters from The Sympathizer as they try to fashion new lives among all the wretched of the earth. Viet Thanh Nguyen gives us an unsparing look at the poisonous effects of ideology - whether colonialism, communism, or capitalism - even as he explores the deep-seated need we all have to believe in something. A deep, compelling and humorous portrait of how we are shaped by fictions others have for us. - Laila Lalami, author of The Other Americans, finalist for the National Book Award

Call The Committed many things. A white hot literary thriller disguised as a searing novel of ideas. An unflinching look at redemption and damnation. An unblinking examination of the dangers of belief, and the need to believe. A sequel that goes toe to toe with the original then surpasses it. A masterwork. - Marlon James, Booker Prize-winning author of A Brief History of Seven Killings

This follow-up to his seminal The Sympathizer is Nguyen at his most ambitious and bold. Fierce in tone, capacious, witty, sharp, and deeply researched, The Committed marks, not just a sequel to its groundbreaking predecessor, but a sum total accumulation of a life devoted to Vietnamese American history and scholarship. This novel, like all daring novels, is a Trojan Horse, whose hidden power is a treatise of global futurity in the aftermath of colonial conquest. It asks questions central both to Vietnamese everywhere - and to our very species: How do we live in the wake of seismic loss and betrayal? And, perhaps even more critically, How do we laugh? - Ocean Vuong, New York Times-bestselling author of On Earth We re Briefly Gorgeous

An elegy to idealism, Orientalism, and existentialism in all its tragic forms, Nguyen's novel doesn't so much inhabit early eighties Paris, as it pulls the plug on the City of Light. Think of The Committed as the declaration of the 20th Arrondissement. A squatter's paradise for those with one foot in the grave and the other shoved halfway up Western civilization's ass. - Paul Beatty, author of the Man Booker prize-winning The Sellout