HER: The Flame Tree by Khanh Ha

Publisher:  Gival Press, (October 1, 2023)
Category: Historical Fiction, Literary Fiction
Tour dates: January 16-Feb 23, 2024
ISBN:  978-1940724454
Available in Print and ebook, 280 pages

Description HER: The Flame Tree by Khanh Ha

If the fate of unrequited love survives fifty-one years, nine months, and four days in Gabriel García Márquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera, it leads the way for HER: The Flame Tree, a spare, remorseless love triptych that sweeps through the rich panorama of two generations of colonial and post-colonial Vietnam. The hopeless love of a young eunuch for a high-ranking concubine is one of this novel’s three stories that illuminate the oriental mystery of Vietnam, as epic as it is persevering,

Despite a rich trove of documentary films, Western readers know little of the spiritual face of Vietnam. Framed between 1915 and 1993, HER: The Flame Tree begins in Huế, the former imperial capital Vietnam. It is in the Purple Forbidden City, that Canh, the young eunuch, fulfills his vow to be near the girl of his dreams, a villager-turned imperial concubine.

The novel begins with an expatriate Vietnamese man living in the United States who journeys back to Vietnam to search for the adopted daughter of a centenarian eunuch of the Imperial Court of Huế to find out who she really is. His world takes on a new meaning after he becames a part of her life.

Phượng. Her name is the magnificent flame tree’s flowers that grace the ancient capital of Huế. Her father, mentor of Canh the young eunuch, was a hundred-year-old grand eunuch of the Imperial Court, who had adopted and raised her since she was a baby. Their peaceful world suddenly changed when one day, sometime in the early years of the Vietnam war, Jonathan Edward came into their lives. On his quest to search for his just deceased lover’s mysterious birth, there he met Phượng, an exquisite beauty.

Through the eye of her father, history is retold. Just before the fall of the French Indochina during the last dynasty of Vietnam, a young eunuch hopelessly fell in love with a high-ranking concubine. Once the eunuch had secured the concubine’s trust, it became a fatal attraction. The eunuch died. The concubine, still a virgin, lost her mind. Her father said she was possessed by the young eunuch’s spirit who had been madly in love with her.

HER: The Flame Tree does not have the flavor of historical fiction, plot-heavy and sexually graphic. Rather, it is atmospheric and impressionistic, in the style of Snow Falling on Cedars. The magnificent poinciana flowers, which grace the ancient capital of Huế, symbolize farewell in Vietnamese adolescent romance. Its symbolic image befits Phượng for her magnanimous nature and grace, and the scarlet blossoming flowers when Jonathan Edward bids Phượng farewell is beauty without sadness—Wait and Hope.

Guest Post by Khanh Ha, Author of HER: The Flame Tree

What process do you go through in creating visual background scenes to involve your audience with the feeling they are in the story?

 I write with cinematic visuals in my head. Words must flow like a river, fast, slow at times. Cadenced words exhale emotions and breathe scents and therefore create moods. Visuals are birthed by the use of language and imagination.

The English language is cashmere to me as a writer, and, in William Faulkner’s The Bear, I found myself falling in love with the English language. His depiction of Lion, the great blue dog, is unparalleled in its sheer power of bringing an animal to life.

Imagination, though, is raw creativity without form, without substance, that ebbs and flows in your mind, leaving just sediment on its bottom until you can dredge it for fecund silt. Does language sustain imagination? Does imagination sustain language? I write from the deep well of my imagination about what I believe in, what I advocate, what I stand for, and I’m always drawn to books that speak to me in their beautiful language. It’s like looking at a woman who is both exquisite and alluring. That’s a writer’s sustenance.

Visuals are paramount in bringing a character to life. To create lively imagery of characters, I must absorb all the details from my research and let them crystalize into a glowing image full of shades and colors; and the ambiance carried in its womb will set up the mood for the characters.

Lastly, visuals are related to senses owing to the ambiance which is the sheer force in a novel. Without it, a novel feels barren. The ambiance brings a novel to life, and what flame the ambiance are tastes, touches, smells, sights, and sounds. All five. They build the mood affected visuals.

Praise HER: The Flame Tree by Khanh Ha

“In this almost folkloric saga of a royal eunuch, his adopted daughter and the tragedies and triumphs of love in their lives from the days of the emperor’s court to the war with America, Khanh Ha takes us deeply into the heart of traditional Vietnam in a tale told in such lushly poetic, descriptive language that it immerses the reader deeply and sensually into the gorgeousness of the land, the texture and taste of food, and the complex humanity of the characters. Her: The Flame Tree is an intricately woven, seductively fascinating story of family, sacrifice, loyalty and redeeming love in the face of heart-breaking loss that breathtakingly weaves the lives of individuals we come to know and care about into the saga of Vietnamese—and American—history.” —Wayne Karlin, author of Memorial Days

“Ha evokes a visceral image of Vietnam . . .  A vivid study of a country’s fraught history and how its people struggled to make sense of it.” —Kirkus Reviews

“Her: The Flame Tree is a beautiful novel, rich with evocations of natural setting in coastal Vietnam; remembered action going back more than a hundred years; and characters both extraordinary and poignantly ordinary, developed by layer upon layer of stories.”—Elizabeth Harris, judge and author of Mayhem: Three Lives of a Woman

“Early in Khanh Ha’s latest novel Her: The Flame Tree, the author describes a book made of delicate leaves of gold. Such a volume would be ideal to record this shimmering and often tender tale of love, loss, and memory.” —Steve Evans, author of The Marriage of True Minds

About Khanh Ha

Award winning author Khanh Ha is a nine-time Pushcart nominee, finalist for The Ohio State University Fiction Collection Prize, Mary McCarthy Prize, Many Voices Project, Prairie Schooner Book Prize, The University of New Orleans Press Lab Prize, Prize Americana, and The Santa Fe Writers Project. He is the recipient of the Sand Hills Prize for Best Fiction, The Robert Watson Literary Prize in Fiction, The Orison Anthology Award for Fiction, The James Knudsen Prize for Fiction, The C&R Press Fiction Prize, The EastOver Fiction Prize, The Blackwater Press Fiction Prize, The Gival Press Novel Award, and The Red Hen Press Fiction Award.

Website: http://www.authorkhanhha.com
Blog: http://authorkhanhha.blogspot.com
Twitter: https://twitter.com/KhanhHa69784776
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/authorkhanhha
Pinterest: www.pinterest.com/khanhha

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