VOICES IN A SALT LAGOON — Maynard Allington

VOICES IN A SALT LAGOON opens with the fall of Saigon to the Communist North in 1975, and the cruel months of occupation that led hundreds of thousands to flee by boat to other nations.

Tran Van Tuan, wrongly accused of working for the American CIA, is trucked to a re-education camp in the highlands. Sentenced to death by a Peoples' Court, he escapes and makes his way back to Saigon to search for his dead brother's young son and the boy's mother, a beautiful and domineering woman Tuan has always secretly loved. Finding them, while still on the run from the authorities, he makes plans to slip out of the country illegally by boat.In a harrowing voyage, they will endure an attack at sea by Thai pirates and a raging typhoon before reaching a refugee camp on an island off the coast of Malaysia. There, under squalid, overcrowded conditions, Tuan must face an agonizing choice - one that will involve life and death.

If Graham Greene's novel, THE QUIET AMERICAN, was a metaphor for American naivete in Vietnam, VOICES IN A SALT LAGOON is the tragic epitaph.