Lanterns on the Slow River

About this book

In the old riverside town of Ben Thuy, the full moon has a schedule and the schedule has a smell: silk, bamboo, beeswax, and the river at dusk. On lantern nights the electric lights go off along the whole waterfront, the Tran workshop's lanterns come out by the hundred, and the town writes its wishes on rice paper, folds them inside the glowing silk, and gives them to the slow brown water, as it has since anyone's grandmother was young. Linh Tran, thirty three, fifth of her line, keeps the workshop and its two secrets. The first is the craft itself, down to the bamboo splitting and the silk dye.