Her: The Flame Tree

by Khanh Ha

Overview

Winner of the Gival Press Novel Award

"In this almost folkloric saga of a royal eunuch, his adopted daughter and the tragedies and triumphs of love in their lives from the days of the emperor's court to the war with America, Khanh Ha takes us deeply into the heart of traditional Vietnam in a tale told in such lushly poetic, descriptive language that it immerses the reader deeply and sensually into the gorgeousness of the land, the texture and taste of food, and the complex humanity of the characters. Her: The Flame Tree is an intricately woven, seductively fascinating story of family, sacrifice, loyalty and redeeming love in the face of heart-breaking loss that breathtakingly weaves the lives of individuals we come to know and care about into the saga of Vietnamese-and American-history."

-Wayne Karlin, author of Memorial Days

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781940724454
Publisher:	Gival Press
Publication date:	10/01/2023
Pages:	278
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.63(d)

About the Author

Award winning author Khanh Ha is a nine-time Pushcart nominee, finalist for The Ohio State University Fiction Collection Prize, Mary McCarthy Prize, Many Voices Project, Prairie Schooner Book Prize, The University of New Orleans Press Lab Prize, Prize Americana, and The Santa Fe Writers Project. He is the recipient of the Sand Hills Prize for Best Fiction, The Robert Watson Literary Prize in Fiction, The Orison Anthology Award for Fiction, The James Knudsen Prize for Fiction, The C&R Press Fiction Prize, The EastOver Fiction Prize, The Blackwater Press Fiction Prize, The Gival Press Novel Award, and The Red Hen Press Fiction Award.

Editorial Reviews

2023-08-07
Characters grapple with the shifting power structures of 20th-century Vietnam in Ha’s novel.

Minh Tánh, a Vietnamese-American graduate student and writer, follows a lead about the adopted daughter of an elderly imperial eunuch serving the Vietnamese emperor in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. He travels to Vietnam to meet Miss Phương Bộ, an aging woman who now lives a simple rural life, but who was born as a consequence of colonialism and conflict; she is half-French and half-Vietnamese, with no knowledge of her birth family. Her adoptive father, Bộ, was once the grand eunuch for the emperor, residing in the Purple Forbidden City, well-connected among the servants and concubines. When Phượng is a young woman, Jonathan Edward, an American working with the South Vietnamese, seeks her out in search of family connections to his dead lover, also a French and Vietnamese woman, who had an identical phoenix necklace to Phượng’s. As she begins to push her father for answers, both Phượng and the reader reckon with the deep, ongoing wounds Vietnam has suffered due to colonialism and war. The author’s narrative switches frequently in perspective and time, toggling between Bộ’s time in the palace, Phượng’s childhood before the Vietnam War, and Minh’s excavation of Phượng’s memories. Through these time jumps, readers see how quickly Vietnam’s social and political structure changed in the 20th century, and how citizens of all classes suffered. Ha evokes a visceral image of Vietnam even as much of the text is rendered in dialogue; the country can hold both flocks of parrots “preening their plumage and eating in a frenzy that the ground was a canvas of colors—blue, green and red” and “shreds of flesh and clothing…skewered on branches.”

A vivid study of a country’s fraught history and how its people struggled to make sense of it.

Kirkus Reviews