The Sympathizer

The Sympathizer is the 2015 debut novel by Vietnamese-American professor and writer Viet Thanh Nguyen. It depicts the anonymous narrator, a North Vietnamese mole in the South Vietnamese army, who stays embedded in a South Vietnamese community in exile in the United States after the end of the Vietnam War. While in the United States, the narrator describes being an expatriate and a cultural advisor on the production of an American film, closely resembling Platoon and Apocalypse Now, before returning to Vietnam as part of a guerrilla raid against the communists.

The novel incorporates elements from a number of different novel genres: mystery, political, metafiction, dark comedic, historical, spy, and war. Thematically, it centres on the dual identity of the narrator, as a mole and immigrant, and the Americanization of the Vietnam War in international literature.

The Sympathizer was published 40 years to the month after the fall of Saigon, which is the initial setting of the book. It was well received by critics and became a bestseller, receiving numerous literary awards including the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

The novel was adapted as a television miniseries of the same name starring Robert Downey, Jr., which premiered on HBO in April 2024.

A sequel, titled The Committed, was published on March 2, 2021. Nguyen has stated that The Sympathizer and The Committed are intended to be part of a trilogy.