'It's Hard To Leave Him': 'Sympathizer' Spy Story Continues In 'The Committed'

Viet Thanh Nguyen's new novel, The Committed, is set in 1980s Paris, but it opens on a small boat in the open seas — crammed with people escaping their homeland. It's a follow-up to his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Sympathizer, which told the story of a communist double agent just after the Vietnam War.

"The Sympathizer and The Committed are novels about history, about politics, about war, about revolutions," Nguyen says. "So they're very serious novels, but at the same time, I wanted to make them entertaining — and also as funny as I could possibly make them — given the context of all the brutality that we're witnessing."