Daughters of the New Year, E.M. Tran
Daughters of the New Year, E.M. Tran
List: $27.99 | Sale: $19.59
Club: $13.99

Daughters of the New Year
A Novel

Author: E.M. Tran

Narrator: Lulu Lam

Unabridged: 10 hr 21 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 10/11/2022

Categories: Fiction, Family Life, Women

Includes: Bonus Material Bonus Material Included


Synopsis

“Daughters of the New Year is engrossing and exhilarating... unifying and contorting a family tied by love, debts, humor, and ghosts. Tran has turned the question of what a family can be into a complex, heartfelt mural of possibility.” –Bryan Washington, author of Memorial and Lot

A captivating debut novel that moves backwards in time to trace five generations of Vietnamese mothers and daughters, drawing on Vietnamese zodiac astrology to chart the fateful events of their lives

What does the future hold for those born in the years of the Dragon, Tiger, and Goat?

In present day New Orleans, Xuan Trung, former beauty queen turned refugee after the Fall of Saigon, is obsessed with divining her daughters' fates through their Vietnamese zodiac signs. But Trac, Nhi and Trieu diverge completely from their immigrant parents' expectations. Successful lawyer Trac hides her sexuality from her family; Nhi competes as the only woman of color on a Bachelor-esque reality TV show; and Trieu, a budding writer, is determined to learn more about her familial and cultural past.

As the three sisters begin to encounter strange glimpses of long-buried secrets from the ancestors they never knew, the story of the Trung women unfurls to reveal the dramatic events that brought them to America. Moving backwards in time, E.M. Tran takes us into the high school classrooms of New Orleans, to Saigon beauty pageants, to twentieth century rubber plantations, traversing a century as the Trungs are both estranged and united by the ghosts of their tumultuous history.

A “haunted story of resilience and survival” (Meng Jin, Little Gods), Daughters of the New Year is an addictive, high-wire act of storytelling that illuminates an entire lineage of extraordinary women fighting to reclaim the power they’ve been stripped of for centuries.

Supplemental enhancement PDF accompanies the audiobook.

About E.M. Tran

E.M. Tran is a Vietnamese American writer from New Orleans, Louisiana. Her stories, essays and reviews can be found in such places as Joyland magazine, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Thrillist and Harvard Review Online. Her essay for Prairie Schooner won their Summer Nonfiction Prize, a Glenna Luschei Award and was listed as a Notable Essay in The Best American Essays 2018. She completed her MFA at the University of Mississippi and a PhD in creative writing at Ohio University.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Jennifer ~ TarHeelReader on November 05, 2022

About the book: “A captivating debut novel that moves backwards in time to trace five generations of Vietnamese mothers and daughters, drawing on Vietnamese zodiac astrology to chart the fateful events of their lives.” “A “haunted story of resilience and survival” (Meng Jin, Little Gods), Daughters......more

Goodreads review by Amanda at Bookish Brews on October 11, 2022

happy publication day to this gem!!! 🤍 if you love generation stories of women youll love this one! I can't wait to support more Viet authors, I don't even need to know anything about this book to know it's going to be important to me 😭💕but it literally has all the elements I know I love. I really ca......more

Goodreads review by Lori on May 14, 2022

In "Daughters of the New Year", Tran gives us a multi-generational novel focusing on the women in a Vietnamese family. Unlike most novels, however, its told in a reverse timeline, starting with the present and working through the past. The first half of the novel focuses on Tran, Nhi, and Trieu who a......more

Goodreads review by Emily on January 19, 2024

A wide-reaching novel of five generations of Vietnamese women and the Zodiac that links them. Going backwards in time and exploring the nuanced relationships between mothers ans daughters, this novel takes a look at the things in life that tear us apart, and the moments that bring us together. It ac......more

Goodreads review by anna on November 01, 2022

rep: Vietnamese & Vietnamese American cast, Vietnamese American sapphic mc, sapphic li, Vietnamese sapphic mc tw: racism, bullying, blood, murder, immolation, sexual abuse it feels more like a collection of short stories than it does a novel. the author over-explains everything, like i don’t need you......more