All That’s Left Unsaid (Tracey Lien, HQ Fiction)

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.

Category: Reviews