This book tells the epic story of how Malaysians took responsibility for their
country and struggled against the odds to change their government and how a
92-year-old former prime minister join forces with the very man he had sent to
jail 20 years earlier, and led the charge to topple the party he once loved
An abandoned package is discovered in the Paris Metro: the subway workers suspect it's a terrorist bomb. A Vietnamese woman sitting nearby, her son asleep on her shoulder, waits and begins to reflect on her life, from her constrained childhood in communist Hanoi, to a long period of study in Lenin-grad during the Gorbachev period, and finally to the Parisian suburbs where she now teaches English. Through everything runs her passion for Thuy, the father of her son, a writer who lives in Saigon's Chinatown, and who, with the shadow of the China-Vietnam border war falling darkly between them, she has not seen for eleven years. Through her breathless, vertiginous, and deeply moving monologue from beside the subway tracks-interspersed with extracts from Thuy's own novel-the narrator attempts to once and for all face the past and exorcise the passion that haunts her