Starred review from July 25, 2022
Set in 1996, Lien’s insightful, emotional debut intelligently incorporates cultural concerns into a tightly focused mystery. Journalist Ky Tran has just launched her career as a newspaper reporter when she returns home to her Vietnamese community of Cabramatta, Australia, for the funeral of her popular 17-year-old brother, Denny, who was beaten to death at the Lucky 8 restaurant on the night of his high school graduation. Since Ky’s grief-stricken parents, who speak limited English, are incapable of pushing for answers, and the police are stymied because none of the dozens of bystanders at the Lucky 8, some family friends, will admit to witnessing Denny’s murder, she decides to investigate herself. Ky must maneuver around her parents’ traditional ways, fear of white people, and superstitions rooted in their Vietnamese culture. The 100% white police force is, at best, indifferent as the Sydney suburb of Cabramatta is a refugee enclave with the worst heroin epidemic in Australian history and where violent crime is the norm. Lien skillfully blends xenophobia and the Vietnamese residents’ suspicions of outsiders into a scintillating plot. Readers will eagerly await Lien’s next. Agent: Hillary Jacobson, ICM Partners.
July 12, 2022
Brutally murdered inside a restaurant on the night of his high-school graduation, Ky Tran’s brother, Denny, has suffered a ‘bad death’. It is 1996, and when Ky (pronounced ‘key’) travels back to her hometown of Cabramatta, she learns that the dozen people at the Lucky 8 restaurant that night all claim to have seen nothing. Grief-stricken and enraged by the silence of her parents and community, Ky, who had moved to Melbourne to pursue a career in journalism, takes matters into her own hands, tracking down the witnesses herself. In All That’s Left Unsaid Tracey Lien balances elements of murder-mystery with a raw and honest portrayal of the refugee and immigrant experience at a time when Pauline Hanson’s maiden speech fuelled anti-Asian rhetoric. Alternating between Ky’s and the witnesses’ perspectives, Lien gives voice to a generation of refugees who fled the Vietnam War and settled in Cabramatta, home to one of Australia’s largest Vietnamese communities. Through the myriad characters the reader encounters, Lien reveals the harrowing effects that war, displacement and intergenerational trauma can have on not only a family, but also a community. All That’s Left Unsaid is an arresting debut by a new Australian voice, for fans of Alice Pung and Liane Moriarty.
Anthea Yang is the editorial assistant at Books+Publishing. Read her interview with Tracey Lien about All That's Left Unsaid here.