A novel by Joseph Andras 

Ho Chi Minh's lost formative years in Paris. 

Fleeing persecution in Indochina, the young Ho Chi Minh arrived in Paris as World War I was sputtering to a close. A painfully shy twenty-something year, he joined the shadowy figures of the demimonde, the radicals, poor artists, prostitutes, the luckless, and rebellious. 

Six years later, he boarded a train bound for the young Soviet Union as the fiery, passionate leader of the Vietnamese independence movement and a founder of the French Communist Party. He had lived under various pseudonyms in a succession of seedy apartments. There had been arrests and beatings, jobs in restaurants and photo shops, revolutionary writings in the Bibliothèque nationale, and meetings with Chaplin and Colette, all while being dogged by French spies-- much of what we know about the young man's Paris years is thanks to that surveillance. 

Joseph Andras tells this story, tracing Ho Chi Minh's time in Paris.