Winner of the Pulitzer Prize - Winner of the National Book Award - Winner of the Bancroft Prize 

Frances FitzGerald’s magisterial account of the war in Vietnam was garlanded with awards when it was first published in 1972. The war was then far from over, and was proving increasingly divisive. This landmark study was the first to look at Vietnam itself, as it was before the war, and to analyse the massive cultural differences between the two societies which doomed the American intervention to failure from the outset.  

FitzGerald first went to Vietnam as a reporter in 1966, and this work is based on years of travel and research. She describes the history and culture of the country – the traditional, ancestor worshipping villages and the corrupt, crowded cities – the conflicts between Communists and anti-Communists, between Catholics and Buddhists, and then the disruption created by French colonialism. With a clarity and authority unrivalled by any book before or since, Fire in the Lake shows how the United States military utterly and tragically misinterpreted the situation in this small, isolated, mostly agricultural Asian society. 

This was the first history of Vietnam to be written by an American, and remains a damning critique of US policies, actions and ignorance in Southeast Asia. This edition contains a new afterword in which FitzGerald updates the story three decades after the American withdrawal. It is essential reading for any student of American history, and indeed for any student of world history. 

Praise for Fire in the Lake:

’Fire in the Lake is a magnificent achievement, huge, wide ranging, fascinating, stimulating. It is the first book I would recommend anyone to read on Vietnam’ — New York Review of Books

‘A compassionate and penetrating account of the collision of two societies that remain untranslatable to one another.  It should also, by its very depth and by its admirable style, help us realize the monumental scope of what went wrong and what we did wrong.… A fine book’ — New York Times Book Review

‘I find Fire in the Lake the bravest and most intelligent effort by an American writer to comprehend the Alice-through-the-Looking-Glass relationship between the Vietnamese and the Americans’ — Washington Post Book World 

Frances FitzGerald is the recipient of the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, the Bancroft Prize, and a prize from the National Academy of Arts and Sciences. In addition to Fire in the Lake she is the author of  The Evangelicals: The Struggle to Shape America, America Revised: History School Books in the Twentieth Century; Cities on a Hill: A Journey through Contemporary American Cultures, Way Out in the Blue: Reagan, Star Wars and the End of the Cold War and Vietnam: Spirits of the Earth. She has written for The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Harper's, The New York Review of Books, The Nation, Rolling Stone, and Esquire. She lives in New York City.