A Wavering Grace: A Vietnamese Family in War and Peace

(Paperback, Main)

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As an Observer correspondent in Vietnam before the American withdrawal in 1975, Gavin Young met many courageous Vietnamese people. He frequently stayed with one such person, Madame Bong, a woman who had lost her husband when she was only twenty-five, had recovered the mangled limbs of one son from a battlefield and watched as another son was sent off to a re-education camp for seven years.

When Young was allowed to return to Vietnam he helped many of Madame Bongs relatives emigrate to the US. A Wavering Grace is a personal account of how one ordinary family survived the horrors of war and a political process that was beyond their control.

By far . . . the most moving account of Vietnam to be written in recent years. Norman Lewis

This delicate, terrible and enchanting book . . . brings the atmosphere of Vietnam so near that you can almost taste and smell it. Jonathan Mirsky, The Times

Full of passion and feeling . . . A Wavering Grace could be described as a love story [and] tells the story of Vietnam and Mme Bongs family in its many conflicting complexions. Andrew Barrow, Spectator

Author Bio

Gavin Young (1929-2001) was a journalist, writer, and briefly a member of MI6. As a journalist, he was most associated with the Observer, being in the words of Mark Frankland's obituary 'a star foreign correspondent'. When disenchantment with journalism set in he turned to the writing of books. The two most famous ones are Slow Boats to China and its sequel Slow Boats Home. He himself had a particular affection for two later books In Search of Conrad (winner of the Thomas Cook Book Award) and A Wavering Grace. These and Beyond Lion Rock, From Sea to Shining Sea, Return to the Marshes and Worlds Apart are all being reissued in Faber Finds.