In French ruled Vietnam in 1922, the French and Vietnamese officers plot to sniff out arch-rebel De Canh.

Set along the southern coast of Vietnam during the French occupation in the 1940s, water is everywhere, giving life and bringing decay and rot. Kim is 15; his father and step-mother have two buffalo, their lifeline as subsistence rice farmers. During the rainy season, there's no grass and the buffalo are starving. Kim volunteers to take the beasts inland to find food. On this coming-of-age journey, Kim sees men mistreat women, men fight with men, and French taxes rob the poor. He works for Lap, a buffalo herder whose past is entangled with Kim's parents, and he makes friends who will lead him to his place in the world.

Follows a young cyclo driver on his poverty-driven descent into criminality in modern-day Ho Chi Minh City. The boy's struggles to scratch out a living for his two sisters and grandfather in the mean streets of the city lead to petty crime on behalf of a mysterious Madame from whom he rents his cyclo.

A young couple, whose love blooms from their mutual appreciation of Chingiz Aitmatov's "Tales of the Mountains and the Steppes", struggles with their personal romanticism and faith in each other as the novel becomes subjected to a new era's changing ideas about art.

A poetic glimpse of life in Vietnam War