It's not often, if at all, that a first novel wins the Pulitzer Prize. But Viet Thanh Nguyen, an English professor in the US of Vietnamese origin, has done it with The Sympathizer by, arguably, writing the best novel so far about the Vietnam war in English. And he does it not by writing about the war, but about a trail of events afterwards.

In a narrow sense, this is the story of The Captain, who, disgusted by the American life, returns spiritually to Communist Vietnam and signs up as a spy, his quarry being The General, who, like many others, left for the US after the fall of Saigon in 1975. But this is also a novel about many other things, including politics, love and literature.

The Captain sits at the heart of the duality of the immigrant, belonging and not belonging to two countries and fighting a fierce battle to find a space with a name and an identity for themselves. When the two countries have been at war, it gets much more complicated. And when the voice in the novel is not the American one that readers have been used to, but the less heard Vietnamese one, you can expect a great deal. And you aren't disappointed by this fast, furious and often funny but inherently tragic novel.

Published in 2015.