Chronicle of a Love Foretold is a hauntingly tender coming-of-age novel about two boys whose love survives distance, silence, and the cruelties of growing up, even as it nearly destroys them.
Dong is the son of Vietnamese immigrants in Mississauga—bright, dutiful, and carrying burdens far heavier than a teenager should bear. At school, he’s mocked for his name, his heritage, his silence. At home, he suffocates under the expectations of parents who mistake sacrifice for love. What no one knows is that Dong is also gay—and that the one spark that makes life bearable is Simon, the boy with the easy smile, the basketball star who once made him believe that kindness could be more than pity, that love could exist even for someone like him.
For a while, Dong and Simon are inseparable: Simon becomes the fire to Dong’s frozen solitude, and Dong the quiet refuge from Simon’s loud, glittering world. But when Simon’s mother discovers that their bond is more than friendship, the illusion shatters. Simon’s family moves away, and Dong is left behind with only his loneliness—and the letters he keeps writing, never knowing if they will be read, never daring to hope for a reply.
Years later, on the cusp of adulthood, Dong is given a chance to see Simon again. A party invitation. A scheme crafted with his two loyal friends, Ames and Lizzie, who are willing to risk everything so he can risk one night. Behind his mother’s back, across the guarded thresholds of class and family, Dong sets out for Oakville, his heart clinging to the hope that love can be resurrected.
But love is never simple. When Dong finally stands before Simon again, the confrontation brings both longing and hurt: why did Simon never answer? Why carry the letters, unopened, in a locked box all this time? In Simon’s eyes, Dong sees the same hunger, the same fear, the same unspoken need. Yet between them lies not only the distance of years, but the weight of silence, misunderstanding, and choices made by others.
Told with aching lyricism and raw intensity, Chronicle of a Love Foretold unfolds in fragments of memory, secret letters, and fleeting nights that feel like lifetimes. It is a story about first love—how it saves, how it scars, how it endures in spite of everything. It captures the contradictions of youth: the recklessness and the hesitation, the yearning for freedom and the fear of losing what little we have.
This novel is also a meditation on identity and inheritance—how growing up between cultures twists the simplest act of love into rebellion, how silence can be both shield and prison, and how forgiveness is often the hardest lesson to learn. Dong’s perspective reveals the crushing loneliness of the child who is always the adult, while Simon’s silence hides a vulnerability that will one day demand to be heard. Their story is one of absence as much as presence, of what is said in a look or a touch when words cannot cross the divide.
Chronicle of a Love Foretold is for anyone who has ever carried a secret too heavy for their years, who has ever written letters they were too afraid to send, who has ever loved someone so deeply that time, distance, and silence could not erase them. It is a novel about survival and tenderness, about the small rebellions of choosing happiness in a world that insists you have no right to it. Above all, it is about the miracle and the cost of loving someone—foretold or not—when the world would rather you did not.
Thanh Dinh received her higher education in Toronto at the prestigious University of Toronto. Many expected her to be a good businesswoman as she chose Management as her major. But she takes her shot and writes stories instead, with influence from countries and cultures across the globe. She becomes the finalist in the DVAN (Diasporic Vietnamese Artists Network) Novel Competition. Despite not winning the prize, she persists. Much like the writers she admires and acts according to Charles Bukowski's advice, her motto is that some stories must be told. And if no one will do it, then it is her job to do so.
