Ocean Vuong was born in a rice paddy outside Saigon. Two years later, his family moved to America. He was the first in his family to learn how to read English. His mother, who still works in the same nail-bar in Hartford, Connecticut, never did. This novel is framed as a letter to her: a letter which she will never read. This allows the author a great deal of freedom. This is both an autobiographical novel and the story of his family in Vietnam before he was born - a history of war and displacement. But it is also a very powerful and personal story of what it feels like to be an immigrant, to be dispossessed, to be other: not just as a young Vietnamese boy in the US, but as a gay adolescent growing up in white-trash America. The novel is a meditation on memory, identity, sexuality and race - but also a frank confession of Vuong's first sexual relationship, with a boy on a tobacco farm - a confession his mother will never be able to read, because she cannot read.