All That’s Left Unsaid

Written By Linda Malek

All That’s Left Unsaid by Tracey Lien

Reviewed by Linda
📕📕📕

Thank you to @hqstories for this copy!

It’s great to see more Vietnamese authors on the map!
Set in Cabramatta, a suburb of Sydney during the 90s drug epidemic, we meet Ky and Denny Tran, the children of Vietnamese immigrants whose parenting has been firm, strict but fair in order to provide a better future for the next generation. This ethos is ingrained into Ky and Denny and 6 years apart, they are both conscientious and an asset to their parents.
Based on experience, the author describes Cabramatta as a town made up of a largely Vietnamese and South East Asian immigrant community surviving on low income jobs and living in seclusion. There is a detailed social commentary which comes across as authentic and I learnt a lot about the Australian-Vietnamese experience, although at times I wished for more positive experiences than negative ones.

Fast forward a number of years and Ky is pursuing a journalism career in Melbourne whilst her brother is celebrating the end of school with his friends at the local restaurant, Lucky 8.
We meet Ky when she learns of her brother’s tragic and brutal death and having learnt that her parents refused an autopsy she is on a grief-fuelled mission to find the answers to the questions that nobody is willing to answer.

In a packed out restaurant filled with diners and staff, how are there no witnesses? Using her journalism background, she interviews and approaches all the relevant members of the community for statements and clues to piece her brother’s murder together.
This book is branded as a murder mystery but I found it very easy to guess who the perpetrator was. This didn’t take away my interest however, as I was engaged right till the last page.
The last few pages were a stroke of genius where Ky’s mother addresses her daughter a number of years in the future and I thought this conversation was powerful, well placed and provided the closure that Ky and the family needed following the turbulent events of the years previous.

Linda Malek

I've always had the urge to set up a forum and voice my thoughts after each read, but never had the confidence to do so alone. 18 months ago, I got my fellow book-loving friends involved and formed The Candid Book Club! Aside from having an exponentially growing to-read pile and deteriorating shortsightedness, we've been lucky to have been invited to publisher events and have attended several talks with our favourite authors (Thank you and long may they continue!) To take a break from the pressures of PhD Chemistry, Jess and I exchanged books all the time and in my youth, I was that kid with the first editions of Harry Potter having already read Gulliver’s travels and some Charles Dickens. At work, my desk is a library and luckily for me I sit next to another bookworm Jack who entertains all the photo-taking. I'm suffering from a chronic case of wanderlust (age-related crisis) so books which are set as far away from home as possible tend to float my boat: Middle East, Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Asia...you name it. But if it's got anything to do with Egypt then I'm all over it. So you get the drift...I read all the time, everywhere (on the tube mostly), everyday, a book a week, and very quickly I'm onto the next! And then sometimes there is a book that stops me in my tracks, makes me want to swallow the pages whole, and have it next to me at all times, with some sentences staying with me forever: Shantaram by David Gregory Roberts, anything by Khaled Hosseini, The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafon, Stay With Me by Ayobami Adebayo (absolute gem of a woman), A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara, A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry, The Good Immigrant edited by Nikesh Shuklaand and anything by Naguib Mahfouz.

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