The Book of Salt

The Book of Salt is the 2003 debut novel by Vietnamese-American author Monique Truong. It follows Bình, a Vietnamese cook in the Paris home of Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas. This book is structured as a stream of consciousness narrative, in which events from the Lost Generation in Paris in the 1920s and 1930s are recounted alongside Binh's memories of his childhood in French-colonial Vietnam.