She Weeps Each Time You're Born

A luminous fiction debut: the tumultuous history of modern Vietnam as experienced by a young girl born under mysterious circumstances a few years before reunification—and with the otherworldly ability to hear the voices of the dead.

At the peak of the war in Vietnam, a baby girl is born on the night of the full moon along the Song Ma River. This is Rabbit, who will journey away from her destroyed village with a makeshift family thrown together by war. Here is a Vietnam we've never encountered before: through Rabbit's 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 realism—Rabbit's ability to "hear" the dead—the novel reconstructs a turbulent historical period through a painterly human lens. This is the moving story of one woman's struggle to unearth the true history of Vietnam while simultaneously carving out a place for herself within it.

Born in Saigon and raised on Boston's north shore, Quan Barry is a professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the author of four poetry books; her third book, Water Puppets, won the AWP Donald Hall Poetry Prize and was a PEN/Open Book finalist. She has received two NEA Fellowships in both fiction and poetry, and her work has appeared in such journals as The Georgia Review, The Kenyon Review, Ms., and The New Yorker. Barry lives in Wisconsin.