A book which manages to be both raw and polished, ultimately I think this is an exploration of self and all the myriad factors that combine to create an individual. The narrator has a complicated inheritance that leads back to Vietnam in the 1960s, and he suffers for racial reasons in America as well as from the overhang of war which has never left his grandmother and mother.

The second part of the story revolves around a delicate love affair, one haunted by its own troubles grounded in addiction.

The prose can be luminous in places, over-written in others (on trainers with lights in their soles: 'the world's smallest ambulances, going nowhere' - yuk!) The strength, for me, is the fragile, anxious atmosphere, where violence is always just about to explode, even in places that should be safe, that are, somehow, simultaneously, loving.

As is often the case with these literary, fragmented novels, as much is said via the silences, breaks and interstices as in the text itself. A haunting read.