Birds of Paradise Lost

From the award-winning author of Perfume Dreams, a collection of thirteen short stories following Vietnamese immigrants new to the United States.

The thirteen stories in Birds of Paradise Lost shimmer with humor and pathos as they chronicle the anguish and joy and bravery of America’s newest Americans, the troubled lives of those who fled Vietnam and remade themselves in the San Francisco Bay Area. The past—memories of war and its aftermath, of murder, arrest, re-education camps and new economic zones, of escape and shipwreck and atrocity—is ever present in these wise and compassionate stories. It plays itself out in surprising ways in the lives of people who thought they had moved beyond the nightmares of war and exodus. It comes back on TV in the form of a confession from a cannibal; it enters the Vietnamese restaurant as a Vietnam Vet with a shameful secret; it articulates itself in the peculiar tics of a man with Tourette’s Syndrome who struggles to deal with a profound tragedy. Birds of Paradise Lost is an emotional tour de force, intricately rendering the false starts and revelations in the struggle for integration, and in so doing, the human heart.

*Finalist for the California Book Award*

“His stories are elegant and humane and funny and sad. Lam has instantly established himself as one of our finest fiction writers.” —Robert Olen Butler, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Perfume Mountain 

“Read Andrew Lam, and bask in his love of language, and his compassion for people, both those here and those far away.” —Maxine Hong Kingston, award-winning author of The Woman Warrior