Alumna Abbigail Nguyen Rosewood '17 to Release Debut Novel 'If I Had Two Lives,' Reading at Book Culture

Fiction alumna Abbigail Nguyen Rosewood '17 is set to release her debut novel, If I Had Two Lives, on April 9, 2019. The novel is available for preorder on Barnes and Noble and Amazon.

If I Had Two Lives follows a young girl from her childhood in a military camp in 1990s Vietnam, where her mother is in hiding as a political dissident, to her adulthood as a lonely and disillusioned immigrant in New York, where she must learn what it means to love and be loved, and to reconfigure home in the aftermath of ruins. The novel is forthcoming in the U.S, UK, and Italy from Europa Editions and Edizioni/Eo.

“A highly evolved, engrossing, and moving novel. Abbigail Rosewood has expanded my worldview through vividly depicted characters that I will long remember. This is a remarkable achievement.”—Professor Alan Ziegler, Author of The Swan Song of Vaudeville.

Rosewood will have a reading at Book Culture on 112th Street on Monday, April 29th at 7pm to discuss If I Had Two Lives. 

“A harrowing, wondrously constructed story of childhood and a brilliant meditation on how life is lived today.”—Professor Gary Shteyngart, Author of Super Sad True Love Story and Little Failure.

In 2012, Rosewood was the recipient of the Michael Baughman Fiction Award and the Outstanding Graduating Student in Creative Writing Award from Southern Oregon University. Her works have been published in places including The Adirondack Review, Columbia Journal, Green Hills Literary Lantern, and The Missing Slate. An excerpt from her first novel If I Had Two Lives was awarded First Place in the Writers’ Workshop of Asheville Literary Fiction contest. Rosewood was born in Vietnam, where she lived until the age of twelve. She currently lives in New York.