Build Your House Around My Body

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Pub Date 8 Jul 2021 | Archive Date 15 Jul 2021

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Description

Feverishly energetic and playfully creepy, an unforgettable debut that hurtles through the ghostly secrets of Vietnamese history

Two young Vietnamese women go missing decades apart. Both are fearless, both are lost. And both will have their revenge.

1986: The teenage daughter of a wealthy Vietnamese family gets lost in an abandoned rubber plantation while fleeing her angry father, and is forever changed by the experience. 

2011: Twenty-five years later, a young, unhappy Vietnamese-American named Winnie disappears from her new home in Saigon without a trace.

The fates of both women are inescapably linked, bound together by past generations, by ghosts and ancestors, by the history of possessed bodies and possessed lands. Barrelling through the sweaty nightclubs of Saigon to ramshackle zoos, colonial mansions and haunted forests, Violet Kupersmith's heart-pounding fever dream of a novel deftly combines Vietnamese history and folklore to create an immersive, playful, utterly unforgettable debut. 



Feverishly energetic and playfully creepy, an unforgettable debut that hurtles through the ghostly secrets of Vietnamese history

Two young Vietnamese women go missing decades apart. Both are fearless...


Advance Praise

'Gorgeous, completely original, and quite disturbing, usually all three at the same time. Beware! This book might swallow you up.' Karen Joy Fowler, bestselling author of We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves 


'Creepy, exciting, moving, insanely funny: a sweat-soaked reading delight. Careering through a host of snaking lives, eras, and beautifully drawn locations in Vietnam, Build Your House Around My Body is mesmerising. An absolute triumph of storytelling.' Nick Bradley, author of The Cat and the City


'Gorgeous, completely original, and quite disturbing, usually all three at the same time. Beware! This book might swallow you up.' Karen Joy Fowler, bestselling author of We Are All Completely Beside...


Available Editions

EDITION Hardcover
ISBN 9780861540990
PRICE £16.99 (GBP)

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Average rating from 34 members


Featured Reviews

I enjoyed the writing and the mystery was starting to get interested, but something about this novel was difficult for me to fully get invested in. Perhaps it was the fact that I made it 40% into this book and still felt like I knew nothing about the main character. If you like slow-burn plots with hidden clues and a rich history, I would recommend this one! It just wasn't for me.

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Truly an incredible debut! So beautifully layered and almost hypnotic in its maze-like structure. Haunting and disturbing yet rich and moving and funny too. It perfectly combines elements from different genres (epic, horror, mystery, magical realism, folklore, historical fiction) to marvellously and masterfully weave together an exceptionally suspenseful and exciting story, one that will stay with me for a long time.

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This huge, sweeping, dizzying debut defies categorisation and will leave your head spinning in the best possible way. A young American woman, Winnie, has gone missing in Vietnam, and her sort-of-boyfriend Long begins increasingly frantic attempts to find her, gradually realising the seriousness of the situation – but we’re then immediately whisked up to the country’s Highlands, eighteen years earlier, to watch a funeral procession in a rural town. The time-travelling continues in beautifully-crafted vignettes like interlocking rooms, each one leading to another in an unexpected way, haunted by ghosts which become increasingly familiar as the connections between characters unfold. It is a sensorial fever dream of a book that’ll frequently make you stop, blink, reread sentences and remain profoundly unsettled – not just by the terrifying magical realism that Kupersmith deftly uses when you least expect it – but by the country’s violent colonial history and decades of cruel wrongdoing that leaves her ghosts bloodthirsty for revenge, lying silently in wait for her characters, hidden just beneath the surface of the story.

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