Hoa Pham is a psychologist, author and playwright. She has written seven previous books. Her novella Wave has been optioned as a film, and rights for a translation have been sold to Vietnam. Hoa won the Best Young Writer Award from the Sydney Morning Herald for her novel Vixen and The Other Shore won the Viva La Novella Prize. Her play Silence was on the VCE drama list in 2010. Hoa is also the founder of Peril magazine, an Asian-Australian online arts and culture magazine.

"Compassion is quiet, still and deep as a well rippling inwards after we put down this book. We are returned to our shared humanity, that muscle holding tenderly the bone." -- Merlinda Bobis

"In tender, lucid prose Hoa Pham distils painful decades of Vietnam’s past into a beautiful Buddhist story of hope, survival and the possibility of transformation for everyone." -- Nicholas Jose