Memories of a Pure Spring is a mesmerizing portrait of modern Vietnam and its people who struggle to survive under the complexities of a post-war regime. During the Vietnam war, Hung, a well-known composer, becomes enchanted by the voice and beauty of a young peasant girl named Suong. He invites her to join his troupe; she becomes his wife and his star performer. But after the war, Hung loses his job, setting off a series of events that drive him and Suong into a destructive spiral. One of Vietnam's most popular writers, Duong Thu Huong draws on her own experiences to describe life at the battlefront, the conditions of a re-education camp, and the texture and rhythm, scents and sounds, of a provincial Vietnamese city. Most of all, she tells a haunting, universal story of failed love. Duong Thu Huong has become the most poignant chronicler of [Vietnam's] disillusionment.... [She] writes beautifully.... (Time Asia) A kind of Vietnamese Farewell to Arms. (Richard Bernstein, The New York Times) Author Bio: Duong Thu Huong, an advocate of human rights and democratic political reform, was expelled from the Communist Party and imprisoned without trial in 1991. The Vietnamese government has effectively banned all of her novels.