Following the success of the two novels Dat troi van vu and Nguoc mat troi, writer Nguyen Mot temporarily departs from the familiar magical style of previous novels to delve deeper into the land of reality with the author's own life experiences in the work From the sixth hour to the ninth hour.

The novel is a true story about the love story of a country boy who escaped the army to the city and fell in love with a girl in the suburbs. Their love story takes place in the context of the war in its fiery phase. However, in the end, this is not a romantic novel, because around this love story there are also intertwined relationships with characters, people with different identities. And covering the fate of each character is the fate of the country when it was divided by the historical war.

Writer Nguyen Mot shared the reason he wrote this novel because war haunted his life: "My parents were both civilians who were killed in the war. Therefore, this work has a realistic color like a memoir, a true story of my life."

Commenting on the work, poet Nguyen Quang Thieu, Chairman of the Vietnam Writers Association, emphasized: "The writer has succeeded in building a diverse system of characters, including ordinary people and people with positions in society, all of whom were tormented by war. There, dreams stopped, fates changed. The war tore everything apart."

Journalist Yen Ba, who had access to From the Sixth Hour to the Ninth Hour since it was still a draft, said, “ The characters in this novel are quite strange. They are neither evil nor good. The book spans the length of history during the country’s tragic period. There, the ignorance of people during wartime and the smallness of human fate in a senseless war are emphasized with a technique completely different from Nguyen Mot’s two previous novels.”

Writer Ta Duy Anh shared: "Reading such passages is just terrifying. And it will make us scream out questions that will never have answers. But war is like that. It turns everything into absurdity, meaninglessness. The greatest humanistic meaning we receive after closing the book is the verdict: War, don't be born into this world! I think this is a novel worth reading because it is not only an unfinished love story but through it, Nguyen Mot has painstakingly brought us the pain of the people in the war."

Writer Nguyen Mot (1964) also had the pen name Da Thao Linh when writing children's books such as Hoa du de, Nam dua tre xom doi, Long lanh gốp nang, Mua trai rinh...

He is the author of nearly 20 books with diverse topics such as short stories, novellas, memoirs, essays, and novels. The short story In front of the river was adapted by director Khai Hung into the TV series Fairy tale about the house . The novel Against the sun was awarded the Trinh Hoai Duc award in 2017 and was translated into English and published in the US under the title Journey against the sun.

In addition, the novel Heaven and Earth in Tumult won the C prize in the 2010 Vietnam Writers Association's novel contest, and was also translated and entered into the US Library of Congress under the title Heaven and Earth in Tumult.

My Anh