All That We Carry Across Oceans: Stories of a Family Between Worlds

AMINA arrives in Canada as a child shaped by war, exile, and the long silence of refugee camps. In Toronto's high-rise apartments she grows up translating letters and late-night calls for parents rebuilding lives far from Somalia, a homeland that survives in kitchen stories, midnight voices crossing oceans, and the quiet sacrifices that shape every decision they make. Determined to honour what her parents endured to bring their family here, Amina becomes the first in her family to attend nursing school, discovering that care is not simply a profession but a language she has always known.Years later, with a husband, a daughter, and a life built between long hospital shifts and remittances sent across oceans, Amina begins to understand the weight of what her parents carried. As her neighbourhood slowly finds its voice in the civic life of the city, old fears and new hopes collide, forcing a community long accustomed to survival to imagine something more.All That We Carry Across Oceans is a novel about what survives displacement: memory, obligation, love, and the quiet labour of carrying more than one home through a single life.