IN COUNTRY

THE NOVELIST Viet Thanh Nguyen can’t remember a time when he wasn’t a refugee. When he was four, in 1975, his family joined the masses of South Vietnamese fleeing the Viet Cong. His first reliable memories began when his family arrived at a Pennsylvania resettlement camp and was temporarily split up. Nguyen’s American saga, including his lonely childhood quest to understand the horrors his relatives endured, has defined his path as a writer. His debut novel, The Sympathizer, the darkly comic confessions of a North Vietnamese spy who flees to America, won the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for fiction. His nonfiction follow-up, Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War, was a finalist for a 2016 National Book Award. Nguyen’s latest, out in February, is The Refugees, a collection