Rights sold
- Ullstein Bucheverlag (Germany)
Read our sample translation of A Thousand Fathers
About the book
In an ice-cold village on the edge of the world a Vietnamese family tries to survive. As refugees they were fished out of the water by a northern cargo ship and placed in a country they knew nothing of. The father departs one day leaving no message. The rest of the family is abandoned to the whims of the Chinese mafia. The eleven-year-old daughter becomes trapped between her mother’s complete despair and the insanity of her unfamiliar surroundings. She finds herself looking at a world in which an excess of imagination is punished. Residents meet every week in the Bald Billiards café to decide who the village belongs to, the sea takes fierce bites out of the land and snow falls endlessly from the heavens. She finds a glimmer of friendship with a man who lives on a dilapidated little boat and asks her a thousand questions.
Her only weapon for finding her father in a world full of whores, toothpaste salesmen and gambling addicts is her rich imagination.