Second paragraph of third chapter:

A woman, not yet thirty, clutches her daughter on the shoulder of a dirt road in a beautiful country where two men, M-16s in their hands, step up to her. She is at a checkpoint, a gate made of concertina and weaponized permission. Behind her, the fields have begun to catch. A braid of smoke through a page-blank sky. One man has black hair, the other a yellow mustache like a scar of sunlight. Stench of gasoline coming off their fatigues. The rifles sway as they walk up to her, their metal bolts winking in afternoon sun.

I came across this when compiling my list of the best known books set in Vietnam; it wasn’t clear to me from online commentary if it satisfied my criterion of more than 50% of it being set in the country. Now that I’ve read it, I can tell you that it doesn’t; the majority of the book is set in Hartford, Connecticut, with a fair bit of back-story in Vietnam and a bit in New York at the end.

It’s quite a tough read. The protagonist is growing up queer and Asian in a very white and straight town. His mother endured unspeakable traumas in Vietnam and passes these on to him to a certain extent. The language is lyrical and convincing but the content rather gruelling. You can get it here.

This was my top unread non-genre fiction book. Next on that pile is Eight Cousins, by Louisa May Alcott, the best-known book published in 1875.