Wonderful new blurb for Lotusland

I’m excited to share that Lotusland has received another blurb for its reissue in early 2025, this time from Wayne Karlin, who I deeply admire as a writer, editor, translator, and humanitarian. Though I may have to shorten the blurb so it can fit on my novel’s back cover, I’ll include it here in its full length. I so appreciate having Wayne’s endorsement.

“Lotusland centers on expatriate American Nathan Monroe, who falls in love with a Vietnamese woman he at first sees as enigmatically elusive. Unlike Thomas Fowler, the central character in Graham Greene’s The Quiet American, Nathan speaks Vietnamese and the Vietnamese people he knows are not projected symbols of what Việt Nam represents to the West; they are complex human beings living in complex relationships with their culture and each other. Much American and Western literature about Việt Nam, whether the country or the war—which for too many is their only definition of Việt Nam—involves foreigners ‘finding themselves’ against a background they view as either deadly, or exotic and strange, a lotusland. Nathan’s experience of Việt Nam, with all its beauty and contradictions as it moves away from the damage and sacrifice of war into the tension between traditional values and global consumerism, is nuanced and layered. To cut through tired assumptions and preconceptions about a place and discover it through fresh eyes and an informed consciousness can be the real gift of expatriate novels: it is a gift David Joiner beautifully presents in Lotusland.”

-Wayne Karlin, author of Memorial Days: Việt Nam Stories 1973-2022 and Wandering Souls: Journeys with the Dead and the Living in Việt Nam