THE UNQUIET DAUGHTER
Piscataqua Press, Portsmouth, NH
SYNOPSIS
In The Unquiet Daughter, a journalist born of the wartime
love triangle that inspired the one in English novelist Graham Greene’s The Quiet American searches for her
British father after barely surviving a bizarre youth of privilege, bewilderment, cruelty and estrangement.
As she yearns
for the love and presence of a father – and that of anyone in her family that was kept from her -- her tall, beautiful
French and Vietnamese mother leaves her in burlesque house dressing rooms in the American Midwest, in convent schools in Long
Island and Dublin and with strangers in New York City. Meanwhile she lies to Danielle about who she is and their past for
decades in this sometime-humorous near-tragic multiple love story and mystery. “I was a living mystery,” Flood
says.
Finally, Danielle
uses her investigative journalism skills to find the truth of what happened between her three parents in early 1950’s
Saigon, where walking down a street or turning a corner could end your life. She relates what she found within the historic
sweep of her family’s history across Southeast Asia, the US, the UK and France during more than a hundred years.
“I have
been looking for home in my house again through these windows that are my eyes, “ Flood says in the beginning of The
Unquiet Daughter. Does she find it by the end of her journey for the truth of who she is?
