Introducing…

THE NAPPER

For fans of Sally Rooney's NORMAL PEOPLE and Coco Mellors' CLEOPATRA AND FRANKENSTEIN, THE NAPPER will have themes of an unsteady female protagonist, a Parisian love affair and self-reclamation.

Thuy Nguyen is your typical high achieving international student in her freshman year of college, except she is burnt out and cannot stop taking naps. When she is not napping, she seeks out new lovers, desiring sexual fulfillment. Hiding her true emotions, a habit from growing up with an overbearing mother, she struggles to get truly vulnerable with her friends and lovers. For the summer, she wins a summer grant to Paris, where she researches an obscure Vietnamese painter. Almost immediately, she has everything she wants—a rich lover and a foothold in the art world. But why isn’t she satisfied?

“The Napper is a lit-fic for the girls: it is a lit fic for the international students…

for the daughters with parents with lofty expectations, and for the girls who are under an insurmountable amount of pressure but just want to live. Burnt out from her aggressive studying in her final year of high school, our protagonist Thuy combats her first year of university at UNC by napping between classes, budding relationships and sexual exploits in the late evenings. Her perceptions of university, virginity and female friendship is authentically relatable - the desire to be considered 'normal' blazing at the forefront of her journey. By summer, when she is completing an art history work placement in Paris, the lines between her work and personal life are blurred, bringing forth the questions of who she wants to be, what she wants to be known for, and who are the people she wants to surround herself with.”

- Reader Response

What Readers are Saying

  • "A sweet and smart coming-of-age novel with a heroine who knows the value of a good nap. Read The Napper and then get some rest."

    - Gary Shteyngart, New York Times bestselling author of the memoir Little Failure (a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist) and the novels Super Sad True Love Story (winner of the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize), Absurdistan, and The Russian Debutante’s Handbook

  • "Encircled by complex relationships with her friends, family and partners, Thuy navigates newfound adulthood from Hanoi to Chapel Hill to Paris. Throughout it all, she questions herself: where is home, truly?”

    -Sarah Lynne, @theonewholikestoread

  • “"i truly loved this book. it was reminiscent of ‘past lives’ and mieko kawakami’s writing — like a warm summer breeze on a night where the sky is exceptionally blue. she fully encapsulates the feeling of having different homes in different cities and different people, and maybe realising that you are your own true home."

    - Amirah, @chaptersofamirah

  • "The Napper is proof that we need more Asian American voices in literature! It starkly and honestly confronts some monumental issues through the lens of a first-generation, female Vietnamese American. I really appreciated that Thuy, the protagonist, contends with issues ranging from depression, sexuality and body dysmorphia to racism and colonialism ... I should add that I cried three times while reading this 200 page book"

    - Grace

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