Woven by Love
Woven by Love — Book One
A story of growing up, surviving hardship, finding faith — and discovering that love can hold a life together.
Born into poverty in Vietnam, Tien grows up in the shelter of a mother whose love is rarely spoken but constantly lived — through long nights at the sewing machine, simple meals, sacrifice, and an unwavering determination to give her children a better life.
Through childhood hardship, abandonment, prejudice, education, friendship, food and family, Tien learns to endure without allowing bitterness to define her. As she grows, faith gradually enters a life already shaped by longing for something greater. Eventually, love leads her to Andrew and to the difficult decision to leave her mother and begin again in Australia.
Tender, intimate and rich with the tastes and memories of Vietnam, Woven by Love is a memoir about resilience, forgiveness, faith, and the quiet forms of love that shape us long before we understand them.
Woven by Love: The Second Thread — Book Two
Leaving home was only the beginning. Now Tien must learn how to belong somewhere new — without losing the person she was before.
The Second Thread follows Tien across the ocean into marriage and a new life in Australia. What begins with hope also brings homesickness, loneliness, cultural displacement, family tensions and the quiet struggles of a marriage still learning how to love.
Yet this is not a story of a perfect marriage or sudden healing. It is a story of staying. Through ordinary meals, difficult conversations, friendship, prayer and the grace of people who refuse to walk away, Tien begins to understand love differently — not as perfection, but as presence.
As her faith deepens, she also begins the harder journey inward: learning that her worth cannot rest entirely in another person’s happiness and that healing sometimes begins when we finally recognise the burdens we have been carrying ourselves.
Woven by Love: The Mother Thread — Book Three
Before there was Tien’s story, there was her mother’s.
The Mother Thread turns back to Le — the woman whose quiet presence has run through the series from the beginning.
Born in rural southern Vietnam in 1960, Le’s childhood begins among rice fields, buffalo, family meals and the ordinary rhythms of village life. Then war enters that world. Childhood gives way to fear, loss, political upheaval and the difficult years that follow.
But this is not simply a memoir about surviving war. It is about what happens afterwards: the work that still has to be done, the children who still need feeding, the clothes that still need sewing, and the life that must somehow continue.
Through war, abandonment, motherhood and hardship, Le rarely names what she is doing as courage. She simply does what needs to be done. The Mother Thread is a tribute to a generation of women whose histories were written not in monuments, but in kitchens, fields, sewing rooms and the lives of the children they kept safe.
Coming soon
Woven by Love: The Thread That Let Go — Book Four
Perhaps the final act of a mother’s love is not holding on — but learning to let go.
After years of sacrifice, Le’s children have grown. They have homes, families and lives that stretch far beyond the house in Vietnam where she once held everything together.
Now the relationship between mother and daughter enters a quieter season.
Tien returns, leaves again, calls from across the ocean and continues building her own life. Le remains. The gestures between them become smaller — food prepared for a journey, a room left as it was, a phone call, a bag of salted fish, things placed carefully in a refrigerator. The hands that once protected and provided must slowly learn to loosen their hold.
The Thread That Let Go is a quiet meditation on ageing, distance, motherhood and the strange truth that letting someone go does not mean losing them. Sometimes it is simply love taking another form.
Coming soon