Vietnamese-American author Violet Kupersmith’s assured debut novel is structured around two disappearances a quarter of a century apart. In 1986 the young daughter of the prosperous Ma family in the Vietnamese Highlands district of Ia Kare gets lost in a rubber plantation after a family argument. Twenty-five years later, Winnie, a young English Language teacher, vanishes inexplicably from her Saigon home.
As Kupersmith’s narrative shuttles between these two timelines we learn of Winnie’s unhappy past and the dark family secrets of the Ma household. We meet Winnie’s boyfriend Long Phan and his policeman brother Tan, who is haunted by a past tragedy in which he was complicit. Other key players include Binh, who is a ghost, a talking dog, a fortune teller, sentient smoke, and snakes – lots and lots of snakes – one of which, crucially for the plot, has two heads
