This May, join AAWW and Yu & Me Books for a celebration of WANDERING SOULS by Cecile Pin, described by Ocean Vuong as “a deeply humane and genre-defying work of love and uncompromising hope.” Cecile will be in conversation with AAWW Senior Programs Coordinator, t. tran le.
After the last American troops leave Vietnam, siblings Anh, Minh, and Thanh journey to Hong Kong with the promise that their parents and younger siblings will soon follow. But when tragedy strikes, the three children are left orphaned, and sixteen-year-old Anh becomes the caretaker for her two younger brothers overnight.
In the years that follow, Anh and her brothers immigrate to the UK, living first in overcrowded camps and resettlement centers and then, later, in a modernizing London plagued by social inequality. Anh works in a factory to pay the bills. Minh loiters about with fellow high school dropouts. Thanh, the youngest, plays soccer with his friends after class. As they mature, each sibling reckons with survivor’s guilt, unmoored by their parents’ absence. And with every choice, their paths diverge further, until it’s unclear if love alone can keep them together.
Told through lyrical narrative threads, historical research, voices from lost family, and notes by an unnamed narrator determined to chart these siblings’ fates, Wandering Souls captures the lives of a family marked by loss yet relentless in the pursuit of a better future. With urgency and precision, it affirms that the most important stories are those we claim for ourselves, establishing Cecile Pin as a masterful new literary voice.
Cecile Pin grew up in Paris and New York City. She moved to London at eighteen to study philosophy at University College London and received an MA at King’s College London. She writes for Bad Form Review, was long-listed for their Young Writers’ Prize, and is a 2021 London Writers Award winner. Wandering Souls is her first novel.
t. tran le is the Senior Programs Coordinator for the Asian American Writers’ Workshop where they have immersed themselves in generating spaces that serve AAWW’s communities of writers and readers. Outside of AAWW, t. is a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominated poet. You can find their work in Apogee, Kweli Journal, Foglifter, and elsewhere. t. serves on the Joint Union-Management Committee of the AAWW Union with UAW Local 2110. For the year 2020, t. was among the 0.1% of Mariah Carey listeners on Spotify.
