"Many authors wear their research on their sleeves, but Stroud manages to evoke the raw beauty of Vietnam and relay historical detail by using tight dialogue and believable characterisation. This not only places the tale in context, but also takes readers beyond narrative into a deeper level of understanding."

South China Morning Post

"Heather Stroud's novel humanizes the Vietnam era in surprising ways. It is not a war novel, though the war is central. It is a novel about people, but international politics, human rights....This is a fine, compassionate book, a model of mature story telling, interweaving character and politics, custom and individual narrative."

Peter Stambler
author of Coming Ashore Far From Home,
winner of the Quarterly Review of Literature's
International Poetry Competition

In Hong Kong she worked in the Vietnamese Asylum-Seeker Detention Centres for Freedom Magazine, and was spokesperson for Refugee Concern HK. After six years of challenging the Hong Kong government and the UNHCR over the legitimate claims of a group of asylum-seekers, persecuted in both China and Vietnam, she succeeded in getting them recognised as refugees. She has travelled widely in Vietnam but, because of her advocacy of returnees, now finds herself unable to get a visa to make further visits.

She is presently working on a second novel, October Chill, which follows the story of an Estonian family who escaped from their homeland after the Russian invasion in 1940.

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