Bich Minh Nguyen – författare

Linny and Van Luong are two second generation Vietnamese immigrant sisters from the American Midwest. Linny, the youngest, is pretty and popular but trapped in a cycle of dead-end jobs and hopeless affairs. Van, plain and socially awkward, is an overachieving immigration lawyer with a seemingly picture-perfect marriage. The sisters have been locked in a relationship of mutual disdain for as long as they can remember.When their eccentric elderly father, inventor of the 'Luong Arm' (a gadget to help short people reach objects in high places), finally decides to take the oath for American citizenship in order to compete in an American Idol style reality show for inventors, the sisters must return to their childhood home to plan a party to celebrate the decision that took thirty years to make. As they navigate their secrets, silences and all that has seemed out of reach to them for so long, Van and Linny realize that they are not so different from each other after all...

From an award-winning author, a novel about a Vietnamese American family’s ties to The Little House on the PrairieJobless with a PhD, Lee Lien returns home to her Chicago suburb from grad school, only to find herself contending with issues she’s evaded since college. But when her brother disappears, he leaves behind anobject from their mother’s Vietnam past that stirs up a forgotten childhood dream: a gold-leaf brooch, abandoned by an American reporter in Saigon back in 1965, that might be an heirloom belonging to Laura Ingalls Wilder. As Lee explores the tenuous facts of this connection, she unearths more than expected—a trail of clues and enticements that lead her from the dusty stacks of library archives to hilarious prairie life reenactments and ultimately to San Francisco, where her findings will transform strangers’ lives as well as her own.A dazzling literary mystery about the true origins of a time-tested classic, Pioneer Girl is also the deeply moving tale of a second-generation Vietnamese daughter, the parents she struggles to honor, the missing brother she is expected to bring home—even as her discoveries yield dramatic insights that will free her to live her own life to its full potential.