As the Heart Bones Break

ISBN 9789814484077

A searing story about a Vietnamese man's struggle to balance the many faces of belong and loyalty in a Vietnamese family torn asunder by war and unresolved peace.

diaspora

Categories:

Fiction

Synopsis

Specification

In Thong Tran's Vietnam, everyone is at war and no one is who they seem. Like everyone, the boy from the Mekong Delta cannot escape the war. And like them, he too must create shades of himself to survive.

But even a conflicted heart needs a home. Thong yearns for a true father and a cause to give himself to. He chooses independence, liberty and happiness--his tutor and the Viet Cong. It is a choice with karmic consequences he will spend the next half century criss-crossing the Pacific to outrun.

Can Thong set down the bones ranking in his heart? And at what cost?

Audrey Chin works with numbers as a financial steward by day and with words at night. Her mission is to tell the Southeast Asian story to an international audience from the point-of-view of a multi-cultural Peranakan woman in Singapore.

Her debut novel, Learning to Fly, was a coming-of-age story set in the rainforests of the region. She is contributing co-editor of Singapore Women Re-Presented, which tells Singapore's social history from the perspective of Singaporean Women.

Audrey is married to Minh and has been a daughter-in-law of the Vietnamese diaspora for thirty years. As the Heart Bones Break is distilled from the many diasporic stories she heard over that period.

Find out more at www.audreychin.com.