The Committed

by Viet Thanh Nguyen Book 2 in the The Sympathizer series.

First published 2021

Amazon

4.2(2,888)

Paris, 1981. After surviving imprisonment and re-education in Vietnam, the unnamed narrator arrives in France as a refugee with his blood brother Bon. The two men try to build a new life by entering the Parisian drug trade, moving through Vietnamese criminal networks, gang rivalries and a city that still bears the marks of France’s colonial relationship with Indochina.

At the same time, the narrator is drawn into the arguments of left-wing intellectuals and postcolonial circles, where the competing promises of communism, capitalism and revolution are examined as fiercely as the violence of the underworld. Continuing the story begun in The Sympathizer, the novel turns exile into a noir journey through early-1980s Paris and asks whether political commitment can survive betrayal, trauma and the legacies of empire.