[2] Bảo Ninh achieved prominence in Hanoi with the first version of the novel, Thân phận của tình yêu (English: The Destiny (Identity) of Love), published on a Roneo duplicator[3] (similar to a mimeograph) before 1990.
Geoffrey Mulligan, an editor there, commissioned Frank Palmos, an Australian journalist who had reported on the Vietnam War and written about it in his book Ridding the Devils (1990), to write an English version based on the raw translation.
[citation needed] Bao Ninh had read Phan Thanh Hao's Vietnamese translation of Ridding the Devils and willingly agreed to this suggestion.
After several meetings with both the author and the translator, Hao, in Hanoi, and journeys throughout Vietnam to check details, Palmos wrote the English version over seven months in secret in his home in Warwick, a suburb of Perth, Western Australia.
[5] The Sorrow of War, written in the stream of consciousness style,[6] opens with a depiction of soldiers on a postwar mission to collect the bones of fallen comrades for reburial.
Kien rides in the truck searching for the remains of fallen soldiers in what he imagines as the "jungle of screaming souls," and recalls that this is where the 27th Battalion was obliterated except for a handful of survivors.
It moves backwards and forwards in time, and in and out of despair, dragging you down as the hero-loner leads you through his private hell in the highlands of Central Vietnam, or pulling you up when his spirits rise.