Build Your House Around My Body by Violet Kupersmith

We first meet Winnie on her arrival in Vietnam. The book’s structure – the story is told out of order – certainly plays into this still, the real stroke of genius, and why I found myself falling in love with Build Your House Around My Body, is that Kupersmith’s subtle skill of drawing our focus away from Winnie’s inevitable fate also matches Winnie’s desire to fade into the scenery. But as we dive deeper into the story, a narrative that spans seven decades and takes us from the centre of bustling Saigon to the haunted forests and rubber tree plantations of the Vietnamese countryside, Winnie’s disappearance becomes background noise. Initially, this foreknowledge lends the novel an uneasy and sinister atmosphere. We’re made aware of this from the very first chapter heading – “June 2010, Saigon, Nine Months Before Winnie’s Disappearance” – and subsequent chapters set during the days, months and years preceding Winnie’s disappearance, as well as a handful that take place after she vanishes.

It’s not a spoiler to say that one of those disappearing girls is Ngoan Nguyen (though she prefers to go by “Winnie”). Violet Kupersmith’s debut novel, Build Your House Around My Body, is a beautifully wrought, non-linear tale of ghosts, missing girls, and revenge set against the backdrop of colonial and post-colonial Vietnam. Violet Kupersmith's heart-pounding fever dream of a novel hurtles through the ghostly secrets of Vietnamese history to create an immersive, playful, utterly unforgettable debut.Build Your House Around My Body, Violet Kupersmith ( Random House 978-0-81299-332-5, $27.00, 400pp, hc) July 2021. The fates of both women are inescapably linked, bound together by past generations, by ghosts and ancestors, by the history of possessed bodies and possessed lands. And both will have their revenge.ġ986: 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.Ģ011: Twenty-five years later, a young, unhappy Vietnamese-American disappears from her new home in Saigon without a trace. Two young Vietnamese women go missing decades apart.

'Beautiful, brilliant, powerful' Madeline Miller, bestselling author of Circe

Build Your House Around My Body by Violet Kupersmith