We told you we were going to keep adding events, didn’t we?

Usually as the holidays approach we tend to dial back on the author events but sometimes an opportunity comes along which is just too wonderful to pass up. This is one of those times.

PLEASE NOTE THAT THIS IS AN IN-PERSON EVENT.

Some of you may remember Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai when she appeared at last year’s Unbound Book Festival as part of a wonderful online discussion about debut novels, which you can watch here. At the time Quế Mai was in Vietnam (yay technology) but she is planning a trip to the US shortly and we are thrilled to announce that as part of her busy itinerary she will be coming to Skylark to talk about her extraordinary book, The Mountains Sing, with Phong Nguyen, the Director of Creative Writing and Miller Family Endowed Chair in Literature and Writing at the University of Missouri.

You really, really won’t want to miss this discussion. The Mountains Sing is a transcendently beautiful novel which has continued to receive awards, accolades, and recognition long after its publication last year.

With the epic sweep of Min Jin Lee’s Pachinko or Yaa Gyasi’s Homegoing and the lyrical beauty of Vaddey Ratner’s In the Shadow of the Banyan, The Mountains Sing tells an enveloping, multigenerational tale of the Trần family, set against the backdrop of the Việt Nam War. Trần Diệu Lan, who was born in 1920, was forced to flee her family farm with her six children during the Land Reform as the Communist government rose in the North. Years later in Hà Nội, her young granddaughter, Hương, comes of age as her parents and uncles head off down the Hồ Chí Minh Trail to fight in a conflict that tore apart not just her beloved country, but also her family. Vivid, gripping, and steeped in the language and traditions of Việt Nam, The Mountains Sing brings to life the human costs of this conflict from the point of view of the Vietnamese people themselves, while showing us the true power of kindness and hope.

Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai is the author of eleven books in Vietnamese and English. She has received some of the top literary awards of Việt Nam, including the 2010 Poetry of the Year Award from the Hà Nội Writers Association. Her debut novel in English, The Mountains Sing, is the Winner of the 2020 Lannan Literary Award Fellowship, a New York Times Editors' Choice, an NPR’s Best Book of 2020, among others. According to the NYT Book Review, The Mountains Singis "a novel that, in more than one sense, remedies history." Quế Mai has a PhD in creative writing from the United Kingdom and currently divides her time between Indonesia and Việt Nam. For more information, visit her here.