ELEVATOR IN SAIGON

A Vietnamese woman living in Paris returns to Sài Gòn for the funeral of her estranged mother.

Her brother had recently built a new house and hosted a grotesquely lavish ceremony to inaugurate what was rumored to be the first elevator ever installed in a private home in Vietnam.

But shortly after the event, in the middle of the night, their mother dies—mysteriously falling down the elevator shaft.

In the days following the funeral, the daughter becomes increasingly obsessed with her family's past.

Her curiosity intensifies when she discovers a cryptic name—Paul Polotsky—in her mother’s notebook.

Like an amateur detective, she begins tracking Polotsky through the streets of Paris, quietly following him as he goes about his daily routine.

At the same time, she dives into her mother’s shadowy history, zigzagging between France and Vietnam in search of answers to the spiraling, perhaps unanswerable, questions her mother left behind.

The novel reflects a Vietnam barely emerging from two devastating wars—the First Indochina War and the Vietnam War—only to fall under the grip of a harsh communist regime.