THE BOY FROM VIETNAM: A poignant and uplifting love story

1989: fifteen-year-old, blonde and lively Nikki Campbell is enjoying an easy, uneventful summer, until a terrible fire guts the factory where her father is manager and a Vietnamese cleaner dies. Nikki’s life is turned upside down. As relations between her parents deteriorate and her father has to leave home to work down south, Nikki and her younger sister have to leave their fee-paying schools and start at a large comprehensive. At first, hating the changes and the way her old friends drop her, it’s through the move to the new school that she meeting and falls in love with handsome seventeen-year-old Duc Mao, one of the refugee ‘boat people’ who escaped persecution in Vietnam. Through Duc, she discovers a side of her town she never knew existed; those of refugees trying to make a new life in Britain. Increasingly, Nikki is drawn into Duc’s world and away from her parents’ values. Duc is attracted to Nikki too, but their friendship is put under severe strain by the inquiry into the fire and the suspiciousness of their families. Duc’s family were close friends of the dead cleaner and her death sparks off further crisis among the Vietnamese. Duc wants a quiet life and to get on in his adopted country, but is increasingly plagued by memories resurfacing of his family’s traumatic escape from Vietnam. Nikki’s love for him is unsettling and challenging – and her increasing interference in their lives bring things to a head – until he knows he must choose where his loyalties lie. Can their new-found love survive all the pressures trying to pull them apart? Winner of an Arts Council Writers’ Award; THE BOY FROM VIETNAM is an emotional, coming-of-age love story, with a big-hearted heroine. View Less