The sorrow of war
Subtitle: a novel of North Vietnam
By: Bao Ninh ; translated from the Vietnamese by Phan Thanh Hao ; edited by Frank Palmos.
Contributors: Palmos, Frank.
Edition: 1st American ed.
Publisher: Pantheon Books
Published: 1995
Place of publication: New York
Language: eng
Number of pages: 233
Subjects: Vietnamese Conflict, 1961-1975 -- Fiction.
Description: The Sorrow of War - by turns bleak and poetic, pellucid and cunning - opens with Kien, an infantry cadre from Hanoi, engaged in the grim business of retrieving and burying the dead at the scene of one of the bloodiest battles of the war.

From here, the novel ranges back to Kien's youth and the pains of adolescent love, and moves forward to his attempts, as a struggling writer in postwar Hanoi, to come to grips with the savageries he has witnessed, to make sense of death, love, and loss - and of his own survival.
Notes: Originally published: Hanoi : Writers' Association Pub. House, 1991.