Twenty-four-year old Ella arrives in sweltering Ho Chi Minh City. It is 1994; the United States has just lifted the crippling trade embargo. Ella sets herself up in a grungy hostel and begins teaching English at a local school. She has come to Vietnam ostensibly in search of information about her father, a veteran, who abandoned the family years ago. ‘What does it mean to miss so much something you barely knew?’ Ella ponders. This narrative foundation – tenuous in the wrong authorial hands – proves a powerful driving force in Myfanwy Jones’s assured debut novel. The search for her father is more one for Ella’s own sense of self and place in the world.