Banyan Moon

What does inheritance mean to you? The older I get the more this word haunts me. At the end of the day, what are we really left with? My parents, who didn’t have much, passed on their stories, which I have struggled to spin into gold, to help me make sense of my own identity and belonging on this pale blue dot.

Banyan Moon valiantly engages with the chameleonic nature of inheritance and the wounds and bonds forged across generations. Thao Thai’s seasoned debut is a beautiful, sweeping, multigenerational tale about three stubborn Vietnamese and Vietnamese American women. It is a tale as old as time—but perhaps new to you—about a daughter’s (Ann) inability to communicate with her estranged Vietnamese mother (Hương). That is, until one day, Ann’s matriarchal grandmother (Minh) passes away, and mother and daughter are forced to confront the past in order to untangle the inheritance Minh has left behind.

I thank Thao Thai for writing this book. Her words have stayed with me long after I finished it. Banyan Moon gives me hope that I can redefine “inheritance” one day, if not for myself, then for the next generation. It may very well do the same for you.

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, Hương.

Back in Florida, Hương is simultaneously mourning her mother and resenting her for having the relationship with Ann that she never did. Then Ann and Hương 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.