Violet Kupersmith Books In Order

Publication Order of Standalone Novels

Violet Kupersmith is a published author. She is known for the books Build Your House Around My Body as well as The Frangipani Hotel, a short story collection.

Violet was born in 1989 in the central Pennsylvania area. She would later move to the Philadelphia suburbs along with her family. Her father is an American who is Caucasian and her mother hails from Da Nang, Vietnam.

Her mother and her family left the country via boat after Saigon fell in 1975. They ended up resettling in Port Arthur, Texas. She graduated in 2011 from Mount Holyoke College. She then went to Vietnam where she spent a year teaching English as part of a Fulbright Fellowship.

Violet also resided in Saigon and Da Lat, Vietnam from 2013 to 2015. She was the David T. K. Wong Fellow for 2015 to 2016 at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, England. She also received a fellowship in 2022 from the National Endowment for the Arts.

Violet has also appeared on the television miniseries Belletrist with Emma Roberts & Karah Preiss.

The Frangipani Hotel is a short story collection from Violet Kupersmith. If you have an affinity for short story collections, then be sure to check this one out!

This is the tale of a young woman who is gorgeous. One night she shows up at the Frangipani Hotel in Saigon, in a bathtub, thirsty. It has been many years that have passed by since the first sighting there.

There is the story of a young woman who is in Houston who finds an older Vietnamese man behind the dumpster naked and makes friends with him.

Then there is the story of a truck driver that has been asked to drive the young man with an unnamed sickness home so that he can die. Then there is another story of two sisters, both American, who are on their way to Vietnam to try and visit their older grandmother– who might not be what she seems to be.

All of these stories are unique and some of them blend the style of the old world and combine it with the new. Thus it is a new way of seeing into the war’s after-effects and how they have affected an entire generation of immigrants who have been displaced from Vietnam and the ones who stayed there.

Read this book to absorb all of the unique short stories and check out the debut work from Violet Kupersmith!

Build Your House Around My Body is the first full-length book to come out from Violet Kupersmith. If you have been looking for something that brings all of the history of Vietnam as well as the folklore to life, then you are in the right place!

When two different young women go missing over the course of different decades, it is worth paying attention to. Both of the young women do not possess fear, and both have been lost. But ultimately, both of them are going to be able to get their revenge.

In 1986, a teen daughter from a well to do Vietnamese family finally loses herself while making her way through a rubber plantation that has been abandoned. She has been trying to escape from her father’s anger and is changed forever along the way.

Then in 2011, a young Vietnamese-American woman who is desperately unhappy goes missing from her home in Saigon and there is no trace of her.

These women’s two destinies are linked together by the generations of the past, by their ancestors, ghosts, by possessed lands and bodies. By their side, we see a young boy who is sent to the French expatriate metis children boarding school, right before Vietnam says that it will be independent from colonial rule.

Two Frenchmen are also trying to get a business started, all with the Vietnam War looming large on the horizon. Then there are the employees who work for the Saigon Spirit Eradication Co. They are looking into odd goings-on in a farmhouse that is located on the forest’s edge.

With every new timeline and character, we are brought closer to being able to understand the common link that connects all of them. This is a ghost story, the story of revenge, a puzzle, and more. It’s a story that will have the reader going everywhere form mansions in the colonial style to random zoos, nightclubs, motorbikes, ex-patriot flats, street carts cooking food in the back alleys, and more.

Take in the history of Vietnam and travel along on a unique story that will have readers turning the pages until they reach the end to find out what happens!