On Thursday, March 23rd at 1:00pm PDT Warwick's will host Cecile Pin as she discusses her new book, Wandering Souls, in conversation with Jeniffer Thompson. Cecile Pin grew up in Paris and New York City. She moved to London at eighteen to study philosophy at University College London and received an MA at King’s College London. She writes for Bad Form Review, was long-listed for their Young Writers’ Prize, and is a 2021 London Writers Award winner. Wandering Souls is her first novel.
There are the goodbyes and then the fishing out of the bodies—everything in between is speculation.
After the last American troops leave Vietnam, siblings Anh, Thanh, and Minh begin a perilous journey to Hong Kong with the promise that their parents and younger siblings will soon follow. But when tragedy strikes, the three children are left orphaned, and sixteen-year-old Anh becomes the caretaker for her two younger brothers overnight.
In the years that follow, Anh and her brothers resettle in the UK and confront their new identities as refugees, first in overcrowded camps and resettlement centers and then, later, in a modernizing London plagued by social inequality and raging anti-immigrant sentiment. Anh works in a clothing factory to pay their bills. Minh loiters about with fellow unemployed high school dropouts. Thanh, the youngest, plays soccer with his British friends after class. As they mature, each sibling reckons with survivor’s guilt, unmoored by their parents’ absence. With every choice they make, their paths diverge further, until it’s unclear if love alone can keep them together.
Told through lyrical narrative threads, historical research, voices from lost family, and notes by an unnamed narrator determined to chart their fate, Wandering Souls captures the lives of a family marked by war and loss yet relentless in the pursuit of a better future. With urgency and precision, it affirms that the most important stories are those we claim for ourselves, establishing Cecile Pin as a masterful new literary voice.
Jeniffer Thompson is a personal branding expert, digital marketing strategist, and publishing consultant. She is an author and speaker who delivers strategy-rich content and actionable tools that educate and empower authors. She co-founded Monkey C Media in 2004, an award-winning book cover and website design house. She is also a co-host of The Premise podcast, co-founder of the San Diego Writers Festival, and serves on the board of the San Diego Memoir Writers Association. Visit MonkeyCMedia.com for author services, and subscribe to Jeniffer’s author marketing tips at JenifferThompson.com.
