The Girl Before Her Papin LinePaperback

A coming-of-age tale of dislocation and inherited trauma from the acclaimed young French Vietnamese novelist

This autofictional novel marks the stunning English-language debut of award-winning French Vietnamese writer Line Papin. Told in three parts, The Girl Before Her moves from a small farming village in Vietnam to France and back again to tell the story of three generations of women as they confront themselves and one another through war, marriage and immigration. The novel's narrator, the child of a French father and a Vietnamese mother, finds herself uprooted and adrift after she moves from the sunshine and chaos of Hanoi, where she was born, to the gray, cold worlds of Toulouse and Paris. This unexpected, unexplained rupturing of her childhood world causes a painful rift in her sense of self--one that ultimately leads to her being hospitalized for