John Balaban and Nguyen Qui Duc (eds.) , Vietnam: A Traveller's Literary Companion (Whereabouts Press, UK/US). Entertaining volume of short stories, written by Vietnamese writers based both at home and abroad.

Bao Ninh , The Sorrow of War (Minerva, UK; Berkley, US). This is a ground-breaking novel, largely due to its portrayal of communist soldiers suffering the same traumas, fear and lost innocence as their American counterparts.

Maria Coffey , Three Moons in Vietnam (Abacus, UK). Delightfully jolly jaunt around Vietnam by boat, bus and bicycle, in which Coffey conspires to meet more locals in one day than most travellers do in a month.

Duong Thu Huong , Novel Without a Name (Picador, UK; Penguin, US). A tale of young Vietnamese men seeking glory but finding only loneliness, disillusionment and death, as war abridges youth and curtails loves.

Duong Van Mai Elliot , The Sacred Willow (OUP). Mai Elliot brings Vietnamese history to life in this compelling account of her family through four generations.

Marguerite Duras , The Lover (Flamingo, UK; HarperCollins, US). The story of a young French girl's affair with a wealthy Chinese from Cholon depicts a dysfunctional French family in Vietnam and provides an interesting slant on expat life.

Bernard Fall , Hell in a Very Small Place (Da Capo, UK/US). The classic account of the siege of Dien Bien Phu.

Graham Greene , The Quiet American (Penguin, UK/US). Greene's prescient and cautionary tale of the dangers of innocence in uncertain times, which second-guessed America's boorish manhandling of Vietnam's political situation, is still the best single account of wartime Vietnam.

Graham Greene , Ways of Escape (Penguin, UK; Pocket Books, US). Greene's global travels in the 1950s took him to Vietnam for four consecutive winters; the coverage of Vietnam in this slim autobiographical volume is intriguing, but tantalizingly short.

Anthony Grey , Saigon (Pan, UK; Dell OP, US). A rip-roaring narrative, whose Vietnamese, French and American protagonists conspire to be present at all defining moments in recent Vietnamese history, from French plantation riots to the fall of Saigon.

Michael Herr , Dispatches (Pan, UK; Random House, US). Infuriatingly narcissistic at times, Herr's spaced-out narrative still conveys the mud, blood and guts of the American war effort in Vietnam.

Henry Kamm , Dragon Ascending. Pulitzer prize-winning correspondent Kamm lets the Vietnamese - art dealers, ex-colonels, academics, doctors, authors - speak for themselves, in this convincing portrait of contemporary Vietnam.

Stanley Karnow , Vietnam: A History (Pimlico, UK; Penguin, US). Weighty, august tome that elucidates the entire span of Vietnamese history.

Gabriel Kolko , Vietnam: Anatomy of a Peace (Routledge, UK). No other recent account of contemporary Vietnam has done a better job of describing the social, political and economic upheavals that the country has suffered over the past few years.

Le Ly Hayslip , When Heaven and Earth Changed Places (Pan, UK; NAL-Dutton, US). This heart-rending tale of villagers trying to survive in a climate of hatred and distrust is perhaps more valuable than any history book.

Norman Lewis , A Dragon Apparent (Eland, UK; Hippocrene, US). When in 1950 Lewis made the journey that would inspire his seminal Indochina travelogue, the Vietnam he saw was still a land of longhouses and imperial hunts, though poised for renewed conflict.

Michael Maclear , Vietnam: The Ten Thousand Day War (Mandarin OP, UK; Avon, US). A detailed yet accessible account of the French and American wars.

Nguyen Du , The Tale of Kieu (Yale University Press, UK/US). Vietnamese literature reached its zenith with this tale of ill-starred love.

Nguyen Huy Thiep , The General Retires and Other Stories (Oxford University Press, UK/US). These short stories by Vietnam's pre-eminent writer articulate the lives of ordinary Vietnamese.

Tim O'Brien , The Things They Carried (Flamingo, UK; Penguin, US). Through a mix of autobiography and fiction O'Brien lays to rest the ghosts of the past in a brutally honest reappraisal of the war.

Robert Olen Butler , A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain (Minerva, UK; Penguin, US). Pulitzer prize-winning collection of short stories that ponder the struggles of Vietnamese in America to maintain the cultural ley lines linking them with their mother country, and the gulf between them and their Americanized offspring.

John Pilger , Heroes (Pan, UK). Pilger's systematic dismantling of the myth that America's role was in any way a justifiable "crusade" makes his Vietnam reportage required reading.

Neil Sheehan , A Bright Shining Lie (Pan, UK; Random House, US). This monumental account of the war, hung around the life of the soldier John Paul Vann, won the Pulitzer Prize for Sheehan; one of the true classics of Vietnam-inspired literature.

Robert Templer , Shadows and Wind (Little, Brown & Co). This hard-hitting book casts a critical eye over Vietnam's decade of reform, from corruption and censorship to the emergence of a consumer-oriented youth culture.

Justin Wintle , Romancing Vietnam (Penguin, UK; Pantheon OP, US). Wintle's genial but lightweight yomp upcountry was one of the first of its kind, post-doi moi.

Gavin Young , A Wavering Grace (Penguin, UK). The poignant tale of a Vietnamese family torn apart by the war and its aftermath, as witnessed by this veteran adventurer.