WHEN SHE SLEEPS

Years after the fall of Saigon, half-sisters Lucy and Mai find one another in the world of dreams. Mai is the Amerasian child of a former U.S. Army surgeon and a Vietnamese linguist, Linh. Although the surgeon had planned to leave his American wife for Linh, in the chaos of the American evacuation, she and her infant were left behind. Now both the girls are teenagers.

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PRAISE FOR “WHEN SHE SLEEPS” (TOBY PRESS)

“(Krygier’s) luminous prose transports the reader from the war-torn ruins of Ho Chi Minh City to the plastic suburbs of 1980’s California, with periodic jaunts through Paris and flashbacks to the Holocaust. She pays off with a poignant epic.” - Newsweek

“Krygier's clear prose brings close the drama of survival, the weight of it, "of those left to sweep up what is left when war is done.'" - Booklist

“Elegant …. Krygier portrays the tentative steps by which two young women discover and come to terms with their identities.” - Kirkus Reviews

“An engaging, lyrical, dreamlike duet between two complex young women, one a Californian, the other Vietnamese, whose lives are connected through love and history, and a single man, their mutual father. Their intricate, often dangerous relationships with their mothers, the women who shared him, are traced with fierce insight and quiet delicacy.” - Janet Fitch, author of “White Oleander.”

“This novel... uses the dualities of light and dark, dreaming and waking, and East and West to remarkable ends. The horror and disruption of war, never discussed directly, are instead made evident in the actions and interactions of the characters. A good literary look at the Vietnam War, this brings together the Vietnamese and the American perspective through the lens of divided families.” - Library Journal

“When She Sleeps” is a mysterious and mystical novel, rich in language, geography, and character development. Leora Krygier’s prose is deeply poetic, and that poetry winds beneath the plotline like the Los Angeles River, seeps into it like Southern California drizzle, lifts and drops it like Pacific Ocean swells. Here dreams can be stolen, pulled in like radio signals, or kept safe by a stranger on another continent.” - The Asian Reporter

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