Kicking the Embers

It is 2008. Sam's dream publishing debut is three years behind him. Now he is a writer without a story. Desperate for inspiration, he takes the opportunity to ghostwrite an old Vietnamese solider's memoir, only to find that his subject, Mr. Lan, is an intractable communist, whose amazing narrative is rooted in the vilification of Vietnamese emigres, the very people Sam's debut celebrated. Retelling Lan's story - beginning in South Vietnam, 1954 - is a creative rejuvenation. As his personal life falls apart, Sam focuses everything on the work, determined to separate the story from the politics. For Lan, the story is the politics. Safe within his Brooklyn apartment and hipster philosophy, Sam feels at liberty to blur the lines, as he traces Lan's journey through rice paddies, opium dens and prison cells, amid the tumult of 1960's Vietnam. History starts to threaten the present as Sam is forced to deal with a worldview that, along with the financial crisis and the 2008 presidential election, threatens to upend his fragile world.