Showing results by narrator "Christine Nguyen" in All Categories

Single mother Alice Chow is drowning. With a booming online business, a resentful teenage daughter, a screen-obsessed son, and a secret boyfriend, she can never get everything done in a day. So it’s a relief when Alice wakes up one morning to find the counters are clear, the kids’ rooms are tidy, and orders are neatly packed and labelled. But she doesn’t remember staying up late to take care of things. As the strange pattern continues, she realizes someone—or something—has been doing her chores for her.

Single mother Alice Chow is drowning. With a booming online cloth diaper shop, her resentful teenage daughter Luna, and her screen-obsessed son Luca, Alice can never get everything done in a day. It’s all she can do to just collapse on the couch with a bottle of wine every night.

In 1980, Y-Dang Troeung and her family were among the last of the 60,000 refugees from Cambodia that then-Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau pledged to relocate to Canada. As the final arrivals, their landing was widely documented in newspapers, with photographs of the PM shaking Y-Dang's father's hand, reaching out to pat baby Y-Dang's head. Forty years later, Y-Dang returns to this moment, and to many others before and after, to explore the tension between that public narrative of happy “arrival,” and the multiple, often hidden truths of what happened to the people in her family.

Ava is the fifth to be born among the stars. Being raised by emotionless, loveless robots doesn’t exactly merit a natural flair for spontaneity or empathy, but Ava makes do. At the very least, she tries to. Her life is here on South Island, where the sea represents freedom and the air symbolizes a dangerous kind of thrill. But now, her existence is under threat. The autonomous supply ship fails to deliver. With only a few weeks’ worth of oxygen left, Ava and her beau must embark on a journey to retrieve more.