DUST CHILD, Nguyen Phan Que Mai (Oneworld, $36.99)
It is hard, sometimes, not to hear music when you’re reading this book – Madame Butterfly’s yearning for Pinkerton’s return in or Kim’s from . Claude-Michel Schönberg and Alain Boublil’s 1989 musical, which reimagines Puccini’s 1904 opera in a Vietnam War setting, has been the focus of considerable controversy, with accusations of Orientalism, is a very different creation, the work of a female novelist, poet and translator who was born in Northern Vietnam and grew up in the Mekong Delta.
