Does Duong Thu Huong have a work in English that could be considered representative?
I would go for
Paradise of the Blind, or if you're up to the doorstopper challenge,
The Zenith. (
Novel Without a Name is also highly regarded)
From the blurbs:
Paradise of the Blind is 'a devastating portrait of three women fighting to maintain their dignity in a society that expects ever greater sacrifices from them. [...] a rich, sensuous journey through a Vietnam never seen before. In images of astonishing grace and power, and through her unforgettable gallery of women, Duong Thu Huong dazzles the reader with her ability to evoke the colors, the foods, the smells, and the age-old rituals of her country.
At the center of the novel is Hang, a young woman forced to grow up too fast in the slums of Hanoi and the turbulence of modern Vietnam. Duong Thu Huong brilliantly captures Hang's rebellion against her mother and the loneliness of her search for self. There is Hang's mother, who watches, powerless, as her life is shattered by a fanatical political campaign led by her own brother. And there is the mysterious Aunt Tam, who has accumulated wealth and bitterness in equal parts and seeks to pass on both to her niece, Hang.
The intoxicating beauty of the Vietnamese countryside, the hunger, the pride, the endurance of ordinary Vietnamese people confronted with the hypocrisy and corruption that surround them - all are here in this moving and lyrical novel."
And "
The Zenith imagines the final months in the life of Ho Chi Minh—president of North Vietnam from 1945 until his death in 1969—at an isolated mountain compound where he is imprisoned both physically and emotionally.
Complex, daring, and elegiac, Duong Thu Huong's novel weaves Ho Chi Minh's story together with narratives of members of his inner circle and a village elder, illuminating the personal costs of political struggle, the addictive quality of power and influence, and how a tragedy can threaten to engulf not just one individual but an entire nation. Most radically, it is a multidimensional portrait of Ho Chi Minh himself; a man who is often painted as a saint, martyr, or puppet, but whom Huong portrays as a real person whose life encapsulated humanity's capacity for vision, greed, pain, love, and fallibility.
An epic masterpiece that is both a gripping political thriller and a haunting excavation of the human heart,
The Zenith is an unforgettable novel that leaves readers unsettled, transformed, and closer to life's fundamental mysteries."
I also know that
Beyond Illusions, her second book, really launched her career and was very widely popular and sold, but I've not read it yet.
Anyone reading French (where she is more translated than in English) can also check out her recent doorstopper diptych
Sanctuaire du cœur and
Les collines d'eucalyptus. Stemming from her real life experience of having a 16 year-old nephew of her cousin run away, she imagines two versions of the story of what could have pushed an adolescent to do so and what becomes of him, with as backdrops a rapidly changing Vietnam.