If I Had Two Lives
About this audiobook
This luminous debut novel follows a young woman from her childhood in Vietnam to her life as an immigrant in the United States—and her necessary return to her homeland.
As a child, isolated from the world in a secretive military encampment with her distant mother, she turns for affection to a sympathetic soldier and to the only other girl in the camp, forming two friendships that will shape the rest of her life.
As a young adult in New York, cut off from her native country and haunted by the scars of her youth, she is still in search of a home. She falls in love with a married woman who is the image of her childhood friend, and follows strangers because they remind her of her soldier. When tragedy arises, she must return to Vietnam to confront the memories of her youth—and recover her identity.
An inspiring meditation on love, loss, and the presence of a past that never dies, If I Had Two Lives explores the ancient question: Do we value the people in our lives because of who they are, or because of what we need them to be?
About the author
Abbigail N. Rosewood was born in Vietnam, where she lived until the age of twelve. She holds and MFA in creative writing from Columbia University. An excerpt from her first novel won first place in the Writers Workshop of Asheville Literary Fiction Contest. She lives in New York. If I Had Two Lives is her first novel.
Emily Woo Zeller is an Earphones award-winning audiobook narrator. After beginning her voiceover career with Asian animation, she returned to the United States and began narrating a broad spectrum of audiobook genres. Her multilingual, multicultural framework brings a particularly unique, clear-eyed, and intimate perspective to the Asian American narratives she specializes in.
