Uyen Nicole Duong – författare

International Book Award Winner, Fiction: Multicultural.

Vietnamese American attorney Mimi Sean Young turns forty and has it all: a partnership in a leading Houston law firm, a sexy younger boyfriend, Brad, also a successful attorney, and all the trappings of a woman who has made it big. When her firm becomes embroiled in what could be an international scandal around a key client and Brad begins asking questions about her past, an overwhelmed Mimi begins to sink into emotional chaos. One glance at herself in an old mirror leads her to dig into her past and courageously relive the traumas of her childhood. Thus begins the heart of Uyen Nicole Duong’s Mimi and Her Mirror, a poetic, passionate, and sometimes chilling novel about Vietnam and a girl known as Mimi Suong Giang, whose youth was destroyed by a brutal assault as she attempted to escape during the fall of Saigon. Readers share young Mimi’s hopes and dreams, her courage following the attack, and one woman’s valiant struggle to find her way into the light.

International Book Award Finalist, Fiction: Multicultural category.

Mimi (the protagonist of Mimi and Her Mirror) is a successful young Vietnamese immigrant practicing law in Washington, D.C. when the postcards begin to arrive. Postmarked from Thailand, each hand-drawn card is beautifully rendered and signed simply “Nam.” Mimi doesn’t recognize the name, but Nam obviously knows her well, spurring her to launch what will become a decade-long quest to find him. As her search progresses, long-repressed memories begin to bubble to the surface: her childhood in 1970s Vietnam in a small alley in pre-Communist Saigon. Back then, who was her best friend as well as her brother’s playmate, and what did art have anything to do with the alleys of her childhood? What was the dream of these children then? What happened when these children were separated by the end of the Vietnam war, their lives diverged onto different paths: one to freedom and opportunity, the other to tragedy and pain? Now Mimi must uncover the mystery of the postcards, including what might have happened to the people who where less fortunate: those who escaped the ravaged homeland by boat after the fall of Saigon. When the mystery is solved, Mimi has to make a resolution: what can possibly reunite the children from the alley of her childhood even when the alley exists no more?