On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

What's in this book, at a glance — five things readers want to know before they start.

What this book is about

Little Dog writes to his Vietnamese immigrant mother, who cannot read. The letter traces her history and her mother's—women shaped by the Vietnam War—alongside his own childhood in Hartford, Connecticut: poverty, a mother's violence and love, a first love with a boy named Trevor who will die of an opioid overdose. Vuong's debut novel is written in prose of extraordinary beauty, finding language for experiences that resisted it. An essential American novel about immigration, queerness, addiction, and what we inherit from those who survived.