Viet Thanh Nguyen talks to Rick O’Shea: ‘My wife was right — there’s deeply something wrong with me’

The Pulitzer-winning author of The Sympathiser why he had to write about growing up as a refugee and how it feels to see one of his novels made into a TV series

Hoa Xuande and Robert Downey Jr in the new Sky Atlantic show The Sympathizer, based on Viet Thanh Nguyen's book

Rick O'Shea

Vietnam is one of the most incredible places I have ever visited, and I came away with a different appreciation of what they called ‘The American War’. That led me to Vietnamese-American writer Viet Thanh Nguyen’s Pulitzer-winning political thriller The Sympathizer. He has just published a memoir — A Man of Two Faces and has picked three very varied choices for Shelf Analysis.

Viet, you start with a fellow Pulitzer Prize winner, Hernan Diaz.