THE JOURNEY OF VAAN NGUYEN

Hoiami Nguyen never imagined that he would end up so far from his home village of Bong Son in Central Vietnam. Yet political circumstances, and the vagaries of life, have washed him to the shores of Israel - one of the thousands of Vietnamese "boat people" who fled the ravages of the Vietnam War in the 1970s and one of the few to be given asylum in the Holy Land.

In Israel, the penniless refugee became a father of five Hebrew-speaking Israeli daughters. His second eldest daughter, Vaan, uses her razor sharp tongue and wit to describe her parents' ordeal on her blog. Caught between her wild and stormy Israeli spirit and her family's expectations that she observe Vietnamese standards of modesty and obedience at home, she feels trapped in circles of identity which will never meet.

When her father returns to his family in Vietnam, Vaan finds herself absorbed into his tragic story - a cruel tale of loss and survival. Hoiami's dream of return sends Vaan to look for a brighter future in the new-old country. She joins him in trying to reclaim the family's land in a remote village at the heart of the Vietnamese jungle.