New York City Book Awards Hornblower Award Winner
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One of Vogue and NPR’s Best Books of the Year
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AudioFile Earphones Award Winner (Audiobook)
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New York City Book Awards Hornblower Award Winner ✳︎ One of Vogue and NPR’s Best Books of the Year ✳︎ AudioFile Earphones Award Winner (Audiobook) ✳︎
Praise for House of Sticks
“[An] unsentimental yet deeply moving examination of filial bond, displacement, war trauma, and poverty…Tran’s narrative power lies in its nuanced celebration of filial devotion that withstands the enormous cost of the American dream.”
—NPR“On the landscape of nail salons and her family’s sweatshop, Ly Tran paints the songs of her courage, dreams, and her fight for sanity and humanity. This is the story of a magnificent lotus who rises up from a pond of mud—the mud of poverty, racism, inherited trauma, depression—with the power and radiance of her storytelling.”
—Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai, PhD, bestselling author of The Mountains Sing“Graceful but unflinching, Ly Tran's House of Sticks follows the author's immigration from Vietnam to New York as a toddler, and the subsequent identity shaping and re-shaping she undergoes throughout her youth and early adult years. Resettled in Queens through a humanitarian program—her father is a former POW—Tran attempts to honor her family through faith and labor, only to find herself yearning for something that exists outside of their home. Intimate yet universal, this is a masterclass in memoir.”
—Elle Magazine
Ly Tran is the author of House of Sticks. She is, by her own admission, terrible at writing bios, though slightly better at writing books.