The Quiet American — Graham Greene (1955)
Set in early-1950s Saigon when the French were losing their war and the Americans were beginning to meddle, this is the essential novel of Vietnam's colonial endgame. Thomas Fowler, a cynical British journalist, watches a young CIA operative install himself in the country with good intentions and catastrophic results. Greene knew Saigon intimately — he was a war correspondent here — and the book captures the city's cafés, the smell of the river, and the peculiar moral fog of a colonial capital in slow collapse. Read it before you walk down Dong Khoi Street.
The Sorrow of War — Bảo Ninh (1990)
The most important Vietnamese novel about the American War, and the counterpoint to the American literature of the same conflict. Bảo Ninh fought with the North Vietnamese army and lost nearly every friend he had; this novel follows a veteran haunted by memory as he tries to write his war experience down. It is neither triumphant nor propagandistic. The Central Highlands battlefields, the jungle, and the ruins of Saigon all feature. That it was briefly banned in Vietnam after publication — too bleak, too ambiguous — only adds to its authority.
A Patchwork Shawl: Chronicles of South Asian Life in Canada — Various (mentioned as contrast; better: Last Night in Saigon or Catfish and Mandala)
Catfish and Mandala — Andrew X. Pham (1999)
A Vietnamese-American cyclist makes a solo journey through Vietnam to understand his family's history and his own place between two cultures. The Saigon sections are vivid and often uncomfortable — the contrast between the city's roaring present and the painful past his family fled. Pham's account of navigating the city as someone who is Vietnamese but reads as foreign cuts to the heart of contemporary Ho Chi Minh City's identity. One of the best books about modern Vietnam by someone who knows it from the inside.
Matterhorn — Karl Marlantes (2010)
Not set in Saigon — it takes place entirely in the jungle near the DMZ — but no novel better conveys what the American War felt like from the American soldier's perspective. Marlantes spent 30 years writing it from his own experience as a Marine officer in Vietnam, and the result is an overwhelming account of what the war did to the young men sent to fight it. Reading it in Ho Chi Minh City, against the backdrop of the War Remnants Museum, gives the exhibits a different weight.
The Sympathizer — Viet Thanh Nguyen (2015)
A Pulitzer Prize-winning novel narrated by a communist spy embedded within the South Vietnamese officer class. The story runs from the fall of Saigon in 1975 through the refugee experience in California and back to re-education camps in Vietnam. Nguyen's unnamed narrator is brilliant and treacherous and funny, and the novel is the most sophisticated treatment of the war's moral complexity in any language. Begin reading it on the plane to Ho Chi Minh City.