This book is set in Cabramatta, 1996, when the suburb is awash in heroin and violent crime. Now living in Melbourne, Ky Tran returns home for the funeral of her high-achieving brother Denny. While out celebrating his high school graduation, Denny was brutally murdered in a local restaurant. But all the witnesses claim to have seen nothing. The local police seem uninterested in another murder within the Vietnamese community and Ky can’t get answers about what happened.
Swamped by grief and guilt, Ky tracks down the witnesses herself. As she edges closer to the truth, she is also forced to confront her own history and of those like her, the children of refugees who fled a war and hoped to make a better life in a new country. Is Ky right in feeling the only available choice growing up was to be perfect or to be bad? Or was her estranged high school best friend Minnie right when she argued the system was rigged against them?
This brilliant book combines the mystery of what happened to Denny with blistering insight into inherited trauma, discrimination and the bonds of family, culture and community. Quite simply one of the best books I’ve ever read.
Reviewed by Melinda Woledge
All that’s Left Unsaid by Tracey Lien was selected as Good Reading’s September 2022 Book Post Pick. Read what we thought of the book.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Tracey Lien was born and raised in southwestern Sydney, Australia. She earned her MFA at the University of Kansas and was previously a reporter for the Los Angeles Times. She lives in Brooklyn, New York. All That’s Left Unsaid is her first novel.
Tracey Lien’s story is tragic, opening and dissecting the truth of what is behind family ties that are readily overlooked. Being a migrant with the hope for a new life, and new beginnings, the sorrow only deepens with cultural and language barriers in a new system foreign to the former. Just like our soldiers of WW11 never talked about their past. This repression may serve a purpose yet it enables the present circumstance to cloud judgment. Not so with Ky Tran, Australian educated with an inquiry mind, who loves and protects her brother in the close Vietnamese community, encounters disgruntled youths of subculture struggling with their own set of difficulties, whose aspirational hard-working parents find to understand.
The drama is gripping right through that resonates with families who have often inherited trauma in their lives.
(5/5)
Eye-opening for the author’s ability to let us walk in another’s shoes.