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Daughters of the New Year: A Novel

by E.M. Tran
A lively, spellbinding tale about the extraordinary women within a Vietnamese immigrant family—and the ancient zodiac legend that binds them together

What does the future hold for those born in the years of the Dragon, Tiger, and Goat?

In present day 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 from her family; Nhi competes as the only woman of color on a Bachelor-esque reality TV show; and Trieu, a budding writer, is determined to learn more about her familial and cultural past.

As the three sisters begin to encounter strange glimpses of long-buried secrets from the ancestors they never knew, the story of the Trung women unfurls to reveal the dramatic events that brought them to America. Moving backwards in time, E.M. Tran takes us into the high school classrooms of New Orleans, to Saigon beauty pageants, to twentieth century rubber plantations, traversing a century as the Trungs are both estranged and united by the ghosts of their tumultuous history.

A “haunted story of resilience and survival” (Meng Jin, Little Gods), Daughters of the New Year is an addictive, high-wire act of storytelling that illuminates an entire lineage of extraordinary women fighting to reclaim the power they’ve been stripped of for centuries.
in Fiction + Short Stories
$27.99
$27.99
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Published October 2022

Hanover Square Press

Hardcover, 320 pages

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[A] daring debut… The novel’s magical realism contrasts poignantly with its depiction of the too-real pressures of assimilation, which the modern Trung sisters face. In spare prose... Precise details… Tran shows us that modern resistance to assimilation is a continuation of a historical fight against imperialism.” -New York Times Book Review