She Weeps Each Time You're Born: A Novel

Quan Barrys luminous fiction debut brings us the tumultuous history of modern Vietnam as experienced by a young girl born under mysterious circumstances a few years before the countrys reunification, a child gifted with the otherworldly ability to hear the voices of the dead.

At the peak of the war in Vietnam, a baby girl is born along the Song Ma River on the night of the full moon. This is Rabbit, who will journey away from her destroyed village with a makeshift family thrown together by war. Here is a Vietnam weve never encountered before: through Rabbits inexplicable but radiant intuition, we are privy to an intimate version of history, from the days of French Indochina and the World War II rubber plantations through the chaos of postwar reunification. With its use of magical realismRabbits ability to hear the deadthe novel reconstructs a turbulent historical period through a painterly human lens. This is the moving story of one womans struggle to unearth the true history of Vietnam while simultaneously carving out a place for herself within it.