Build Your House Around My Body

Feverishly energetic and playfully creepy, an unforgettable debut that hurtles through the ghostly secrets of Vietnamese history

Two young Vietnamese women go missing decades apart. Both are fearless, both are lost. And both will have their revenge.

1986. The teenage daughter of a wealthy Vietnamese family gets lost in an abandoned rubber plantation while fleeing her angry father, and is forever changed by the experience.

2011. Twenty-five years later, a young, unhappy American named Winnie disappears from her new home in Saigon without a trace.

The fates of these two women are inescapably linked, bound together by past generations, by ghosts and ancestors, by the history of possessed bodies and possessed lands.

Barrelling through the sweaty nightclubs of Saigon to ramshackle zoos, colonial mansions and haunted forests, Violet Kupersmith's heart-pounding fever dream of a novel deftly combines Vietnamese history and folklore to create an immersive, playful, utterly unforgettable debut.

ISBN: 9780861542147 | Published: 3 May 2022 (first published 2021) | Paperback | 400 pages