Shade and Breeze
Má dreams of wealth and grandeur, Hieu dreams of Finnish girls. The younger brother, always on the periphery, always an observer, gradually disappears into his schoolwork, mesmerised by his own intellect.
The three of them form a solitary world in a small Ostrobothnian town on the west coast of Finland. Má and Hieu, constantly on a collision course with each other and the community’s suffocating social codes. They live among people who want to talk openly about everything, who don’t understand the necessity of sometimes remaining in the shade.
In sensitive and transfixing prose that has the effect of a series of tableaux, and with chapter headings reminiscent of the intertitles in a silent film, Tran’s multi-award-winning debut is a moving story about love, the compulsion to create, and the meaning of family.
Tran's second novel Other People's Pleasure was published in 2025.
Publishing information
Rights sold
- Danish (Turbine)
- English (Lolli Editions)
- French (Le Castor Astral)
- German (Residenz Verlag)
- Norwegian (Oktober)
- Vietnamese (AZ Communication and Culture Company Ltd)
Awards & nominations
Awards
2022
Borås Tidnings Debutant Prize
2022
Runeberg Prize
2021
Svenska YLE Literature Prize
Nominations
2022
The Katapult Prize
Reviews
“Quynh Tran’s prose is vivid and cinematic, sensuous and full of images and descriptions that are both suggestive and alluring… An elegant and impressive debut.”
“With great sensitivity to detail and tight, charged language, Quynh Tran tells of the family bond as strength and shackle, and of the emigrant’s eternal homelessness.”
“Quynh Tran writes beautiful, saturated prose.”
“A perceptive debut, where the significant events are intentionally placed in the background, in line with the family’s wishes. Not everything should be discussed, claims the mother whose anger instead turns into a physical condition – a slap here and there. Nobody is capable of seeing how their actions cause a ripple effect, how human darkness is passed down through generations. In different ways, the family members try to find a mutual place where they can love one another. This makes Shade and Breeze a complex, delicate, and wistful debut. It deserves to be pulled into the light.”
