Not only was The Sympathizer the breakout book of 2015, it was also author Viet Thanh Nguyen’s debut novel — extremely impressive for a story that took home the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, the Andrew Carnegie Medal For Literary Excellence, and the Edgar Award for Best First Novel. And now, in 2024, it’s a miniseries from HBO/A24 directed by Park Chan-wook (The Handmaiden) and starring Hoa Xuande (Cowboy Bebop).
This captivating tale follows a spy torn between worlds during and after the Vietnam War and explores themes like identity, allegiance, colonialism, and more.
“This novel is meant to be a response and a rebuttal to what I perceive of as a certain kind of thinking that American writers and filmmakers have had about Vietnam. I respect many of these novels and films, but I strongly disagree with how they portray Vietnam and Vietnamese people and the Vietnam War in ways I think are fundamentally mistaken,” Nguyen said of his bestselling book in an interview with The Center for Fiction.
Anyone who’s read Nguyen’s work inevitably goes searching for books similar to The Sympathizer. A natural place to start is with his other works, including The Committed. If you’re looking to branch out to other authors, I recommend The Storm We Made by Vanessa Chan.
This list of The Sympathizer readalikes ranges from espionage thrillers to stories of cultural displacement, and they’re all well worth a read.
1. The Committed by Viet Thanh Nguyen
This highly anticipated sequel to The Sympathizer dropped in 2021 — and it doesn’t disappoint.
Set off the tourist path in the immigrant neighborhoods of 1980s Paris, the nameless narrator continues his quest for revolution, but finds himself caught up in the capitalist market of drug dealing. The Committed is a serious triple threat: a look at the aftereffects of colonization, a funny satire, and a gripping crime thriller.
2. The Refugees by Viet Thanh Nguyen
Another must-read by Nguyen, this short story collection humanizes refugees and gives voice to their pain. With this literary triumph, Kirkus calls the author “the foremost literary interpreter of the Vietnamese experience in America.”
Each story highlights Vietnamese American immigrants, some of whom were torn from their homeland and forced to make a new life in California amid the Vietnam War. Memory, trauma, colonization, and the weight of straddling two worlds play prominent roles in each affecting vignette.
Nguyen shares his personal connection to these experiences and themes in his memoir, A Man of Two Faces. (The title may ring familiar if you’ve read the opening line of The Sympathizer: “I am a sleeper, a spook, a man of two faces.”)
3. The Storm We Made by Vanessa Chan
In the years preceding World War II, Cecily Alcantara is taken with the idea of building an “Asia for Asians,” and begins spying for the Japanese to usurp British rule over her home country of Malaya (now Malaysia). A decade later, the fallout of her choices has devastating consequences — not just for the nation, but within her own family.
Chan’s historical fiction offers richly drawn, morally complex characters dealing with generational traumas as the fallout of war and occupation.
4. The Mountains Sing by Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai
In discussion with NPR, Nguyen calls The Mountains Sing “the Vietnamese version of The Grapes of Wrath.”
The first novel in English by Vietnamese poet Quế Mai, this book traces a family in Vietnam as the country shifts from being a French colony to the Vietnam War to the modern day, along with every painful societal change in between. The Mountains Sing is a stirring masterpiece that reveals how trauma cascades through generations — and an ideal choice if you’re wondering what to read if you like The Sympathizer.
5. The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid
The Reluctant Fundamentalist opens in a café in Lahore, where a Pakistani man tells an unnamed American interlocutor the story of how he fell in and out of love with America pre- and post-9/11.
The story follows Changez, a Princeton grad who finds success in New York City with a well-respected career in finance. But after the towers fall, Changez is viewed with suspicion simply for being Pakistani.
This powerful story (shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize) challenges common presumptions and poses thought-provoking questions about America’s influence in Islamic countries. As LitHub writes in an article about Hamid’s novel, “It is easy to hate when we make the world small and simple; it is harder to hate large groups when we are able to understand the variety that lives in said groups.”
6. True Believer by Kati Marton
If you enjoyed the espionage angle of The Sympathizer, Marton’s book is an excellent follow-up read. This is the true story of Noel Haviland Field, who, drawn to idealistic notions about Communism, went from being a U.S. state department worker to a Soviet spy.
Marton is singularly equipped to tell this tale, as her Hungarian journalist parents were granted the one and only interview Field and his wife gave to the press.
Ultimately, Field suffered horribly (via imprisonment and torture) at the hands of Stalin agents, but he remained loyal until death. His story highlights how romanticizing certain ideals can go so very wrong.
7. Leaving Berlin by Joseph Kanon
Like Nguyen’s narrator in The Sympathizer, the protagonist of Kanon’s novel is a spy. But his motivations have little to do with idealism and instead are in the pursuit of freedom.
Jewish writer Alex Meier escapes to America on the cusp of World War II, leaving his native Germany behind. But when he falls under suspicion during McCarthy’s Red Scare, he agrees to return to East Berlin as a secret operative who reports back to the CIA. Not only is his mission dangerous, it also forces him to choose between a clean slate and the woman he’s loved for years.
Leaving Berlin is a thrilling spy novel and an immersive work of historical fiction.
8. The Sorrow of War by Bảo Ninh
This emotional novel chronicles the life of Kien, a North Vietnamese soldier, during and after the Vietnam War. Raw and heartbreaking, it gives American readers a glimpse of those on the other side that are so often demonized. Kien’s trauma and grief act as an indictment on the glorification of war and the leaders who instigate it but rarely pay the personal price.
Author Ninh, who entered the Glorious 27th Youth Brigade at just 17 years old, drew inspiration from his own life when writing this book. Out of 500 young soldiers in the brigade, only 10 survived, including Ninh.
9. The Leavers by Lisa Ko
Deming Guo, born in America to an undocumented teen from China, is only 11 when his mother disappears without a trace. He’s eventually adopted (and renamed Daniel) by an uppercrust white couple who understand little of his experiences, and Deming continuously struggles to feel a sense of belonging in either America or China. Then one day, he receives shocking news about his long-lost mother.
Ko’s debut novel won the PEN/Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction and was a finalist for the National Book Award for Fiction. It’s at once a heart-wrenching story about a mother and child and an empathetic commentary on the painful realities of migration.
10. The Lotus Eaters by Tatjana Soli
This historical novel about love and ambition is set against the backdrop of war-torn Saigon.
Helen Adams is a fish out of water in more ways than one. Not only is she an American in Vietnam, but she’s also one of the rare women photojournalists covering the conflict. Her work leads her into the orbit of two other photographers, one of whom is Linh, a former Vietnamese soldier watching his homeland crumble around him.
Helen experiences startling revelations through this sprawling story — about herself, the war she witnesses first-hand, and her morally gray career.
11. The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan
On the surface, The Joy Luck Club is about four women meeting weekly to play mahjong. But once you dive in, you’ll soon find it’s a powerful and emotional story of immigrants finding community in a new country and bonding over shared aspirations for their children.
This story of mothers and daughters — inspired by stories from Tan’s own mother — is relatable and heartfelt, with complex characters that will speak to anyone who connects with Viet Thanh Nguyen’s novel.
12. All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr
Like The Sympathizer, Doerr’s masterwork is a Pulitzer Prize winner set against a history-defining conflict, with characters who give us surprising insight into the people we so readily call enemies.
A rare book that takes a well-worn subject and adds an unforgettable spin, All the Light We Cannot See follows the twin narratives of Marie-Laure, a blind French girl, and Werner, a German orphan forced into the military, at the height of World War II and Nazi Germany’s reign of terror.
This story’s imagery of war-torn France is haunting, and the characters are so rich in depth that devouring the whole story is inevitable. Netflix adapted the book into a miniseries that stars Aria Mia Loberti, Mark Ruffalo, and Hugh Laurie.
