E.M. Tran

Daughters of the New Year

DAUGHTERS OF THE NEW YEAR begins in 2016 New Orleans. Xuan Trung, former beauty queen-turned-refugee after the Fall of Saigon, is obsessed with divining her daughters' fates through their Vietnamese zodiac signs. But Trac, Nhi, and Trieu diverge completely from their immigrant parents' expectations. Successful lawyer Trac hides her sexuality in shame; aspiring actress Nhi is portrayed as the villain on a Bachelor-esque reality show; and Trieu, the youngest, flounders post-college without any clear aspirations. The three sisters grapple with their parents’ rigid standards and their mother’s irksome paranoia, and are forced to reckon with the generational trauma rooted in their ancestry. The novel moves backward in time, the Trưngs surviving major historic events including Hurricane Katrina, 9/11, and the Vietnam War. Eventually, the narrative moves into the perspectives of grandmothers, great grandmothers, and the revered Vietnamese woman warriors after which the protagonists are named.

Publisher: HarperCollins / Hanover Square Press
Publication Date: October 11, 2022
ISBN: 9780369722645

“Daughters of the New Year is engrossing and exhilarating... unifying and contorting a family tied by love, debts, humor, and ghosts. Tran has turned the question of what a family can be into a complex, heartfelt mural of possibility.” –Bryan Washington, author of Memorial and Lot

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HARPER COLLINS

E.M. Tran is a Vietnamese American fiction and nonfiction writer from New Orleans, Louisiana. She has stories, essays, and reviews that appear in such places as Joyland Magazine, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and Harvard Review Online. Her essay published in Prairie Schooner was the winner of a Glenna Luschei Award and listed as a Notable Essay in Best American Essays 2018. She completed an MFA at the University of Mississippi and a PhD in Creative Writing at Ohio University.

www.elizabethmtran.com

Tags: Adult, Contemporary, Literary, Women's Fiction, BIPOC