Banyan Moon

A Novel

By: Thao Thai

Narrated by: Cindy Kay, Catherine Ho, Elyse Dinh

A TODAY Show #ReadWithJenna Book Club Pick

""A riveting mother-daughter tale."" — Elle

""Radiant. … An intimate account of one family’s planting of roots in American soil and the sacrifices great and small that each member makes along the way.” — Washington Post

A sweeping, evocative debut novel following three generations of Vietnamese American women reeling from the death of their matriarch, revealing the family’s inherited burdens, buried secrets, and unlikely love stories.

When Ann Tran gets the call that her fiercely beloved grandmother, Minh, has passed away, her life is already at a crossroads. In the years since she’s last seen Minh, Ann has built a seemingly perfect life—a beautiful lake house, a charming professor boyfriend, and invites to elegant parties that bubble over with champagne and good taste—but it all crumbles with one positive pregnancy test. With both her relationship and carefully planned future now in question, Ann returns home to Florida to face her estranged mother, Huơng.

Back in Florida, Huơng is simultaneously mourning her mother and resenting her for having the relationship with Ann that she never did. Then Ann and Huơng learn that Minh has left them both the Banyan House, the crumbling old manor that was Ann’s childhood home, in all its strange, Gothic glory. Under the same roof for the first time in years, mother and daughter must face the simmering questions of their past and their uncertain futures, while trying to rebuild their relationship without the one person who’s always held them together.

Running parallel to this is Minh’s story, as she goes from a lovestruck teenager living in the shadow of the Vietnam War to a determined young mother immigrating to America in search of a better life for her children. And when Ann makes a shocking discovery in the Banyan House’s attic, long-buried secrets come to light as it becomes clear how decisions Minh made in her youth affected the rest of her life—and beyond.

Spanning decades and continents, from 1960s Vietnam to the wild swamplands of the Florida coast, Banyan Moon is a stunning and deeply moving story of mothers and daughters, the things we inherit, and the lives we choose to make out of that inheritance.

Great weaving of stories

Loved the stories of 3 women woven into each other and how it leads to present day. Fantastic read.

Beautifully written, superb narration

A lovely story, heartfelt, heart wrenching but also heart mending. The narration is absolutely perfect.

The tale of mothers

This book is amazing! I had to read it for my women’s studies class and it honestly made me cry. It describes different experiences of loss and love three women face; which makes them mothers and survivors. Definitely recommend!

The Beauty of Different Cultures in the United States

I always love hearing stories about people leaving their homelands & culture, and how they have adapted and worked so hard for their generations that follow, to have a better than the have had. Their following generations have equally interesting stories, becoming bicultural, then you know most of the next generations will likely adapt to life with American culture, in this book anyway.

Interesting characters, but almost DNF

I loved that it’s a Vietnamese family and it touched on life both before and after immigration, which is what kept me going, but it took me a while to come back and finish. I wasn’t sold on what was driving the story as a whole and when there is a big reveal, it doesn’t come until near the end and felt a little anticlimactic.