The Bitter Leaf (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9798199313117)

The Bitter Leaf

When Mai left her family's farm in rural Quảng Nam for a career in Hanoi, she told herself it was ambition. Six years later, a telegram pulls her back: *Your father is unwell. Come home when you can.*

The "when you can" means now.

What she finds is a farm on the edge of losing everything. Her father, Hùng, is quietly dying among the rows of bitter leaf trees he has tended for thirty years. Her brother Tuấn is disappearing into the very crop they grow. And a district official with old debts and new ambitions has set his sights on their land, forcing long-buried truths back into the light.

*The Bitter Leaf* is a novel about what we inherit - land, silence, and the slow weight of what was done before we were old enough to choose. Set in Vietnam in the years after the Đổi Mới reforms rewrote the country's rules, it asks what it costs to stay, what it costs to leave, and whether roots can still hold when the soil shifts beneath them.

Set on a Kratom farm in central Vietnam in the early 1990s, The Bitter Leaf follows Mai, a Hanoi-based planner who returns home when her father Hùng's health fails and finds herself drawn into the moral, economic, and historical entanglements rooted in the "bitter leaf" trees her family grows. As she relearns the farm and its community, she confronts her brother Tuấn's developing dependency on the farm's product, the district officer Phúc's coercive attempt to seize their land for quasi-pharmaceutical investors, and the buried wartime atrocity that links her father and Phúc via documents hidden in a tin box. The novel unfolds as a slow-burn family, land, and systems drama in which Kratom becomes the axis for questions of use versus harm, rural agency versus state power, and whether long-deferred truth can be told without destroying what remains.

Author: James Tylee
ISBN-13: 9798199313117
Publisher: Independently Published
Language: English
Published: 06/06/2026
Pages: 224
Format: Paperback
Weight: 0.61lbs
Size: 9.00h x 6.00w x 0.56d