The Sympathizer

Viet Thanh Nguyen's debut novel is narrated by an unnamed captain in the South Vietnamese army who is secretly a communist mole. Half French and half Vietnamese, he calls himself a man of two minds. After the fall of Saigon he arranges his escape to America alongside the general he advises, and settles among Vietnamese exiles in Los Angeles while still sending reports to his handlers. The story mixes spy fiction, war novel, dark comedy and metafiction, and turns on the narrator's double identity as agent and immigrant. It won the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and was adapted as an HBO miniseries in 2024.

Bill Gates said it showed him what the Vietnam War was like for Vietnamese people caught between both sides, after years of books and films told from the American view. Dow Chemical chief executive Andrew Liveris named it in a roundup of books CEOs planned to read over the summer.