✍️ Synopsis
Orphaned siblings Anh, Thanh and Minh begin a perilous journey from Vietnam to Hong Kong before seeking refuge in the UK. The story follows the three siblings as they strive to survive in a world unknown to them as they come to terms with their new identities.

💭 Thoughts
Wowww this was beautiful, I can’t believe it’s a debut novel 🥹 The emotions and thoughts of the characters were captured with such purity, they emanated from the page. My favourite passages were those told from the perspective of Dao, one of the lost brothers, who watches over his siblings as a wandering soul. They were so poetic and moving!
Everything about this book was perfect ❤️

A moving account of hope and survival. I loved the multiple voices and was rooting for the main character all the way through. Wandering Souls captures a refugee experience in an incredibly sensitive and emotive way. The writing is beautiful and the creative structure is engaging and well executed. I loved this book and can't wait to read more from this fantastic debut author.

I want to acknowledge at the start of this review that Cecile Pin's debut, Wandering Souls, is a deeply felt story about the weight of intergenerational trauma that obviously means a great deal to the author; I also respect her desire to highlight the stories of East Asian refugees to the UK, stories that are still not often told. Having said that, I'm afraid this just did not work for me as a novel. It follows siblings Anh, Thanh and Minh who flee Vietnam in 1978 as part of the wave of 'boat people' who left the country after the end of the Vietnam War. Arriving first in Hong Kong, Anh, Thanh and Minh eventually gain asylum in Britain and a council flat in Catford. However, their parents and younger siblings, who departed Vietnam in a separate boat, are killed in a massacre on the island of Koh Kra.

There's a basic narrative drive throughout the first half of Wandering Souls as we follow the fate of the three siblings, but the writing is so flat and awkward. As with too many intergenerational family sagas of this kind, it also fails to characterise any of its protagonists beyond their position in the family - so we have the dutiful older sister, the rebellious middle brother, the fun younger brother. The portrayal of Britain is also surprisingly simplistic - good refugee camp volunteers, bad Thatcher, and most of the population are good and welcoming apart from a few bad racists. It's a story that will be familiar to British readers, and which won't do anything to unsettle or challenge them.

Pin does attempt to do something more interesting with the structure of Wandering Souls, as the central story is interspersed with brief sections from Dao, one of the dead siblings, who is a rootless ghost because he was never laid to rest in Vietnam. We also get bits from a more scholarly narrator in the present who is putting together the story of her family's past. On top of all this, there are fragments from the point of view of US soldiers in Vietnam taking part in 'Operation Wandering Soul', where troops played recordings of eerie noises and voices to make Việt Cộng forces believe they were being haunted by their dead. This latter interlude, in particular, is so promising thematically, but is just dropped. The book doesn't hang together.

This is an important story worth telling, but I can't recommend this novel: instead, I'd suggest seeking out something like Sharon Bala's The Boat People, which tells the story of Sri Lankan refugees to Canada in the early twenty-first century, or Jing-Jing Lee's How We Disappeared, about the abuse of Singaporean women by Japanese troops during the Second World War. 2.5 stars.

I received this book from Netgalley in exchange for an honest, independent review.

Sixteen-year-old Anh leaves Vietnam along with her younger brothers, Thanh and Minh. It's 1978, the American troops have gone, and they are off to join their uncle and his family in the States to start a new life.

Their parents and younger siblings will join them later, but Anh, Thanh and Minh must embark on a perilous boat journey to Hong Kong alone.

As the weeks go on, it becomes clear that their family has not survived the voyage. Anh, Thanh and Mind are alone in the world, with no family or home. They travel through refugee camps and resettlement centres until they are assigned a country in which to build a new life.

Wandering Souls is a heartbreaking novel about survival, hope and family. I was stunned to find out this is a debut.

The term 'wandering souls' refers to the Vietnamese belief that souls continue to wander the earth if not returned home for a proper burial.

I do not tend to read historical fiction, but I really enjoyed learning about Vietnamese history as well as the experiences of the refugees living in the various campsites.

I loved the way the story flowed and how inventive it was, with occasional chapters by the siblings' youngest late brother, Dao, one of the wandering souls not yet laid to rest, who now walks alongside his siblings. Newspaper clippings are also supplied throughout the book, which added the right amount of politics to the book, while also keeping it personal.

The writing was beautiful and very moving; so well-written and at times poetic. I found myself really caring about the characters; they felt so real. They, along with their story, will stay with me for a long time.

An unforgettable, poignant debut! Definitely my favourite book of the year so far!

Wandering Souls' title provides the thematic structure for this thought-provoking refugee tale.
This book tells the moving story of a family divided by death when they try to escape their home country of Vietnam. We follow the journey of Anh, a teenage girl and her brothers, Minh and Thanh as they try to seek better lives in the face of the terrible loss of their parents and other siblings and the place they call home.

This book examines grief, trauma and what it means to try to build a new life. I found the information slowly revealed about Vietnam and its history along with the honest, unembelished refugee experience really moving and touching. This is a brave debut written from the heart.

This honest review is given with thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for this book.

Wandering Souls has the bones of a fantastic account of one family's journey from Vietnam to the UK. It is not an easy read, nor should it be.

The year is 1978. Anh is 16 and together with her brothers Minh, 13 and Thanh, 10, she sets off for the perilous boat journey from Vietnam to Hong Kong. The rest of her family are due to meet them at the refugee camp in a few weeks.

But their family don't make it. And there's no time to grieve when you're trying to survive.

Eventually settling in London, the siblings face prejudice and poverty, but Anh spends her life taking care of her brothers to the best of her ability.

This story is interspersed with snippets from US soldiers reflecting on their actions in the Vietnam war; from the ghost of Anh's dead brother and from one lorry driver bringing desperate souls to the UK, with horror awaiting them. I found these brief interjections disjointed but this may be format issues with the ARC copy potentially.

Overall I found this to be a moving and thought-provoking story that reminds us all of the human will to survive through extreme adversity.

I got Wandering Souls by Cecile Pin from NetGalley for free for a fair and honest review.


Wandering Souls by Cecile Pin is the story of 3 children from a family who escaped Vietnam on a boat in the late 1970’s shortly after the Vietnam war.

Along with the struggles they had adapting to living in a foreign country with a different language and culture.

For a lot of people reading the Wandering Souls is as much as an historical novel as reading one set in the early 1800’s.

However with me as some one who was alive at the time the that Anh, Thanh and Minh flee there home land, it gave me an insight to the events of the time and how some people have got along since.

In many ways you could describe this book as a modern day news story meets The Grapes of Wrath and the aftermath of the Vietnam war.

However Wandering Souls by Cecile Pin is a lot more than that with it being not only a the basic narrative, but it also contains news stories of the time, and the use of the religion of Vietnam to make the story more poignant.

There are times when reading Cecile Pin story that it really does pull at the heart strings especially when the family are having their last meal together at home before, Anh, Thanh and Minh left amongst others.

In addition Wondering Souls has a number of chapters which takes a wider look at the story in addition to straying into magical realism wile this may take the story in a direction for some readers, for me it really did take the story in different directions and gave it a basis in the culture of the individuals of the story.

Marking Wandering Souls by Cecile Pin well worth reading.

I went into this novel knowing nothing about why people came to the UK and America from Vietnam as refugees in the 1970s and 80s but Pin managed to both educate me as well as transport back to that time period.

The book follows three siblings who are still children as they leave their family behind to take a boat towards hopefully a new future in US. We follow their story through hardships and refugee camps and learning new languages and cultures. The novel also deals with the secrets refugees keep to try and protect their own children from the horrors that they have endured and the impact that this has. If you enjoyed Peach Blossom Spring then this is a book for you, as the topics and beautiful story telling have many parallels.

I really enjoyed Wandering Souls, it’s opened my eyes to this piece of history and it’s the type of book that will stay with you long after the final page.

A powerful story well told. The stories of the Vietnamese boat people are fading into history now. I remember them featuring on the news years ago, but most people have forgotten them now. This is a well written short novel that brings together different strands of the tales and lives of the refugees as a fictionalised account, though grounded in fact. I think it is necessary to be reminded of the facts, now that the world has moved on. This book is a quick effortless read. The story does not sag or get bogged down. The short chapters fly by. It is an important book that hopefully will be widely read.

Wandering Souls is an important and poignant novel and a promising debut. Telling the story of migrants from the 1970s, it is timely and heart-wrenching but not overly sentimental. The characters are very likeable and relatable, and the small details of day-to-day life are well told. The main narrative is interspersed with other viewpoints, and I found this element took away from the novel. Probably because the main character's story was so compelling, I resented being pulled away from it.
Of all the novels about migrants' stories in recent years, it is one of the stronger. Possibly because, set in the 1970s, we get to see how their lives progressed but also as it cleverly doesn't spill over into sentimentality.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for the ARC

This is a deeply moving book which intertwines various stories.

The central story is that of Anh and her brothers Minh and Thanh from a rural village in Vietnam. Their father sends them on ahead to escape after war has ravaged their country. He is to join them with the rest of the family with the aim to start a new life in America like some of their relatives.
Unfortunately this doesn't go according to plan and Anh and her brothers have to navigate a life very different from the one their father envisaged.

Woven in with this strand is a shorter one about the experience of American soldiers involved in Operation Wandering Souls.
Another strand is the voice of their brother Dao who is a wandering soul of a different variety (I don't want to give any spoilers)

The book isn't linear in its structure but moves forward and back in time.

Its themes are transgenerational trauma, loss, the importance of family and how it feels to be a refugee.

I found it to be a thought provoking, sensitive and deeply moving book that has relevance for current times in the way that we treat any refugees fleeing from a war zone or fleeing their country for any other reason.
I enjoyed learning more about Vietnamese culture and particularly the food aspect.

The reason I give it 4 stars is that I gave Ocean Vuong's "On Earth we're Briefly Gorgeous" 5 stars and although Wandering Souls is a very good read it doesn't achieve Vuong's exceptional status.

If a book is endorsed by Ocean Vuong, it’s a book I’m reading.

Wandering Souls follows the story of a family of so called ‘Boat People’ - refugees who escaped Vietnam and its war by tumultuous, and often deadly journeys via boat across the sea to a refugee camp in Hong Kong. The story spans over many decades, and is told from many different voices. Our main protagonist is Ahn, the elder sister who is left to look after two of her younger brothers when they are separated from the rest of their family.

It’s a moving debut, a story which is interspersed with voices from beyond the grave. It’s an unusual structure, which sometimes feels as though it doesn’t quite hit the mark, and there was a voice referred to as ‘I’ for much of the book, which was a little confusing. I wondered if the author had been referring to herself, but a novelised version of herself, and it’s only explained in the latter part of the book who this ‘I’ is actually referring to. Spoiler: it’s not Cecile Pin herself.

I found myself Googling ‘Operation Wandering Souls’ as I learned what it was referencing, thinking ‘surely not?’, but actually, yes, truth is sometimes worse than fiction. The things that we have done and continue to do to each other, as humans, is often truly horrendous. I’m not sure what it says about me that I found Operation Wandering Souls to be more grotesque than the idea of thousands of soldiers killing each other for reasons that often aren’t fully personal. Sure, we have our ‘Be Kind’ movements, but sometimes I find myself uncertain about whether the scales is truly balanced in favour of good.

This novel gives voice to the hundreds of thousands of displaced people throughout history. The racism, the cruelty, the confusion of landing in a new place in which they must often feel unwelcome, the culture shock, the trauma. It does this by focusing in on one family as they find themself halfway across the world, with nothing, and nobody but each other. It’s a very short novel, and I found myself wanting more of their story than I got, because I found it hard to connect to the myriad of characters and narrators in so few words. But again, maybe that’s something that says more about me than anything else.

It’s a heartbreaking, difficult and necessary story to read, and some of Pin’s use of language is beautiful, but I found myself left feeling as though something was missing.

For me, nothing groundbreaking, but a short and interesting read nonetheless.

'Wandering Souls' is a powerful and haunting debut novel about three siblings who leave Vietnam by boat in the late 1970s and then travel from Hong Kong to the UK as refugees. Cecile Pin uses their experiences to tell a wider story about the Vietnamese Boat People and about loss, grief and intergenerational trauma.

The story of Anh and her younger brothers Minh and Thanh is written in the third person with a simplicity that becomes deeply affecting as it is their experiences that are foregrounded - the loss of their parents and younger siblings, their time at a refugee camp in Hong Kong and a resettlement centre in Hampshire and their attempts to live up to their parents' aspirations for them as they make new lives for themselves in London. In particularly struggles with her changed identity as, aged 16, she is forced to take on the role of mother to her two siblings at a time when they are all mourning in different ways.

Pin intersperses this narrative with the voice of their younger brother Dao, one of the 'wandering souls' who follows his older siblings as a ghost because he has not been laid to rest in his home country, and with notes, observations and records from someone in the present day who is trying to understand Anh's story in a wider context, including reference to the Mỹ Lai massacre by US soldiers, the murder and rape of Vietnamese refugees on Koh Kra island by Thai fishermen, and the Vietnamese refugees found dead in a lorry in Essex in 2019. The novel therefore makes for harrowing reading at times, but Pin creates moments of hope through the bonds established between some of the refugees and the kindness that is sometimes shown to them. As the narrator reflects at one point, "I am trying to carve out a story between the macabre and the fairy tale, so that a glimmer of truth can appear."

These elements combine to create a profound and richly textured novel which is both personal and political, specific and universal. Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for sending me an ARC of this novel to review.

This is a remarkable debut. It is one of those books where you really feel that every single word is important and has been perfectly chosen. It tells the very moving story of a family of Vietnamese ‘boat people’ and their journey from Vietnam to their final abode . Having been involved with one such family in the UK in the late 1980s who my family and I helped assimilate into our local community this story was particularly poignant. The story is beautifully written and well researched. I found it hard to put down and felt like I was there with Anh and her family. Although it is early in 2023 I think this could be my book of the year.

An incredibly readable and consuming debut proven by the fact I read this in under 24 hours. The structure and style of this book wasn’t what I expected but it works well. I can see why this has been featured frequently as a hot tip for 2023 releases. Without spoilers, I loved Dao’s sections and this added an extra element to the story for me. I think lots of people would enjoy this and I’m excited to see what Cecile Pin does next.

This is a the moving and lyrical tale of a family from Vietnam; separated during a desperate plan to escape to America by boat, oldest daughter Ahn is left to raise her brothers after her parents and younger siblings don't. make it. Loosely based on Cecile Pin's own family history (I believe), it follows the family as they move from a refugee camp in Hong Kong, to a UK camp to London, and then assimilate.

The narrative voice of Ahn is interspersed with newspaper cuttings from the time, a storyline following some American soldiers fighting in Vietnam, the voice of one of her drowned siblings and someone researching, which we later discover is Ahn's daughter. I loved the factual newspaper articles and voice of the drowned sibling, but the researcher voice was sometimes a little unclear, and felt the least developed. I also didn't love the American soldiers - they didn't really feel necessary - the role they played could have been easily done by more of Dao (the drowned sibling) and more of the newspaper cuttings.

All in all, it was a beautiful book - I have already recommended it to someone, and will keep an eye out for more from this author.

Wandering souls by Cecile Pin

The smile that spread across my face when I saw that @4estate had given me a digital Arc… I was glowing walking around Christiane.

☁️ A stunning, heart wrenching debut novel. Pin had me in tears. Such an important story and one that we all should sit around the table and listen to.

📖 Wandering souls is based loosely on Pin’s family experiences. It follows the story of three siblings with the plan of travelling from Vietnam to Hong Kong and then onto America. Like so many fleeing war and hopes for a better life, the other members of the family do not make it. Anh, the eldest sister, is forced to grow up and be the caretaker of her two younger brothers as they move from refugee camps and then settling in the UK.


✨ The story felt like rising heat. I could feel it the emotions pushing down on me from the very start. The proses settled on my skin and made my mouth dry, making me uncomfortable and seeking comfort. I knew very little of this part of UK history and it is now my job to continue to educate myself.

Everything about this story is expertly done and you’re taken on an emotional ride. I was reading in a coffee shop and had to go to the toilet to have a little cry.The use of news reports, letters from government officials responding to the crisis, the observations and thoughts of Dao and the current day reports- so skilful orchestrated.

A devastating story but one I heard loud and clear.

💕 I can’t wait for to purchase the physical copy. I’m so sad to have missed out on the event at the @bookbar but I’ll be keeping my eyes peeled for anymore events.
Wandering Souls comes out in March and IS A MUST BUY.

I stumbled on this book and upon reading the description, I just knew I had to read it. Having both parent who were boat people during the Vietnam war, I've been trying to find any material, especially one that gives a Vietnamese UK refugee perspective, to get some idea of the tumultuous journey they took to get to where they are today. What I didn't know was just how much this book would touch me.

At first I wasn't so sure about the way the book was laid out. I was skeptical about how the main story jumped so quickly and how the little stories in between fit into it all. But I have to say, the wider perspective from the different narratives made it more compelling. I applaud Pin for adding in the chapter about the lorry in Essex which took place in more recent times. I believe it's a poignant story that has never left me and I'm sure caused ripples in the Vietnamese communities here in the UK. But what I truly treasure about this book is just how much it hit so close to home for me. I grew up in South East London and hearing the places that were mentioned alongside my own parents stories of their passage to where we call home, it just seemed so familiar. I've never read a book like that in my life and I guess that why I felt even more connected to it.

Overall, it's rare for me to finish a book in a less than a week these days. But I unknowingly devoured this book in 2 days and that's just a testament to how moving and beautifully written this story is. Despite how heartbreaking and harrowing the tale is, it's an important one and I'm so glad it was told.

"Wandering Souls" is one of the strongest and most well-structured debut novels I have read in a while; Pin's prose is polished and flowing, even when relating the conditions at the refugee camps, whilst the portayal of Anh's family bond and fate felt sincere and powerful.

I found Wandering Souls to be beautifully written, and very moving. I'm always a fan of an inventive narrative style, and so I enjoyed the different viewpoints - I felt they added something which wouldn't have been felt if we saw the narrative only in a linear fashion, through Anh's eyes.
This novel is deeply sad at points - I found the inclusion of more recent news stories to be absolutely gut-wrenching - but there are some kernels of hope in here too. The importance and joy of a "mundane" life is truly celebrated by the end of the novel, and Pin handles the subjects of grief and inter-generational trauma very thoughtfully.