The Napper: A Novel

by Linh Luu

Thuy Nguyen is your typical spoiled rich international student in her freshman year of college, except she is depressed and cannot stop taking naps to escape from the flashbacks of her emotionally traumatic childhood. When she is not napping, she uses hook-up sex to fill the empty void inside her heart. Oscar, a Senegalese-American classmate of Thuy, is her complete he is stable, career-minded and has an optimistic outlook on life. For the summer, Thuy wins a summer grant to Paris, where she researches an obscure Vietnamese painter. In Paris, she gets caught up in an intense love affair with an older married man. When Oscar pays Thuy a visit, Thuy's life becomes even more emotionally chaotic and confusing than she can handle. Will she choose Oscar despite fearing that the other shoe will drop if she feels emotionally supported for the first time in her life? Is the stable, hard-working immigrant in Oscar going to be happy with the fickle, ever so erratic Thuy?

187 pages, Paperback

Published August 9, 2024

About the author

Linh Luu is a writer who traveled from Hanoi to NYC.

She has an M.F.A in fiction from Columbia and was a Morehead-Cain Scholar at the University of North Carolina - Chapel Hill.

She is interested in protagonists who don’t always do the expected.

She also writes non-fiction and has published book reviews and personal essays on identity, womanhood and power. She was previously an apprentice at The Believer Magazine. 

Reviews

[Daniella · Rating 4 out of 5]

This felt like reading a compiled stack of letters and journal entries from your best friend you needed to catch up with because you both ended up in a different college. I adored it mostly because it touched on deep subjects. Including mental health and post traumatic stress that was personally relatable. I didn't expect that going in when finding it on a whim, and gravitating toward that aesthetically pleasing cover first. Delightful book to read in one sitting especially right before a nap <3