The unnamed narrator of Viet Thanh Nguyen’s 2016 best-selling novel, The Sympathizer, is a Communist spy embedded as a CIA-trained captain in the South Vietnamese secret police during the final days of the Vietnam War. The story opens on the eve of the fall of Saigon, as the narrator follows his charge—a comical, self-important army general—to California, where he must maintain his double-agent cover while surviving as a refugee. In HBO and A24’s limited-series adaptation, whose second episode... Read this story
