Elevator in Sài Gòn

Winner, 2024 English PEN Translates Award

A suspenseful novel that is part detective story, historical romance, postcolonial ghost story and a biting satire of life in a communist state.

A Vietnamese woman living in Paris travels back to Sài Gòn for her estranged mother’s funeral. Her brother had recently built a new house and staged a grotesquely lavish ceremony for their mother to inaugurate what was rumoured to be the first elevator in a private home in the country. But shortly after the ceremony, in the middle of the night, their mother dies after mysteriously falling down the elevator shaft. Following the funeral, the daughter becomes increasingly fascinated with her family’s history, and begins to investigate and track an enigmatic figure, Paul Polotsky, who emerges from her mother’s notebook.

Like an amateur sleuth, she trails Polotsky through the streets of Paris, sneaking behind him as he goes about his usual routines. Meanwhile, she researches her mother’s past – zigzagging across France and Vietnam – trying to find clues to the spiralling, deepening questions her mother left behind unanswered – and perhaps unanswerable.

Translated by Nguyễn An Lý. Originally published in 2013. Description taken from publisher.