The Sorrow of War - by turns bleak and poetic, pellucid and cunning - opens with Kien, an infantry cadre from Hanoi, engaged in the grim business of retrieving and burying the dead at the scene of one of the bloodiest battles of the war. From here, the novel ranges back to Kien's youth and the pains of adolescent love, and moves forward to his attempts, as a struggling writer in postwar Hanoi, to come to grips with the savageries he has witnessed, to make sense of death, love, and loss - and of his own survival.

Author Biography

Bao Ninh was born in Hanoi in 1952. During the Vietnam War he served with the Glorious 27th Youth Brigade. Of the five hundred who went to war with the brigade in 1969, he is one of the ten who survived. A huge bestseller in Vietnam, The Sorrow of War won The Independent Foreign Fiction Award for 1994. It is Bao Ninh's first novel.